Northwestern

Some feel rain. Some feel the beetle startle
in its ghost-part when the bark
slips. Some feel musk. Asleep against
each other in the whiskey dark, scarcely there.
When it falls apart, some feel the moondark air
drop its motes to the patch-thick slopes of
snow. Tiny blinkings of ice from the oak,
a boot-beat that comes and goes, the line of prayer
you can follow from the dusking wind to the snowy owl
it carries. Some feel sunlight
well up in blood-vessels below the skin
and wish there had been less to lose.

That gaunt old man came first, his hair as white
As your scoured tables. Maybe you’ ll recollect him
By the scars of steelmill burns on the backs of his hands,
On the nape of his neck, on his arms and sinewy legs,
And her by the enduring innocence
Of her face, as open to all of you in death
As it would have been in life: she would memorize
Your names and ages and pastimes and hometowns
If she could, but she can’ t now, so remember her.

Lately, too much disturbed, you stay trailing in me
and I believe you. How could I not feel
you were misspent, there by books stacked clean on glass,
or outside the snow arriving as I am still arriving.
If the explanations amount to something, I will tell you.
It is enough, you say, that surfaces grow so distant.
Maybe you darken, already too much changed,
maybe in your house you would be content where
no incident emerges, but for smoke or glass or air,
such things held simply to be voiceless.

And if all those who meet or even
hear of you become witness to what you are —

a white country of blight beneath the last snows of
spring. Could we remain quiet on earth

and bear it, the war we make inside
what is — it’ s a long time to be here, to be still,

to feel the rot inside now — bone-scrap, char, sheets of stars
at the edge of a field where we are once again

taken from ourselves. Could we remain here,
witness to grief, one last bright dire call-and-reply,

Among the many lives you’ ll never lead,
consider that of the wolverine, for whom avalanche
is opportunity, who makes a festival
of frozen marrow from the femur of an elk,
who wears the crooked North Star like an amulet

of teeth. In the game of which animal
would you return as, today I’ m thinking
snowshoe hare, a scuffle in the underbrush,
one giant leap. You never see them
coming and going, only the crosshairs

The field blank in snow. But I mean this page.
Now print mars the surface to make surface
Seen. Sheen only error brings. Perfect rage
So the sun rises. Rage is your slow practice
That makes of every day another day
In whose gathering promise the shy sparrows
Shiver instead of sing. I want to go away.
See these footsteps? These black shapes in the snow?
If there is a word for them, it’ s no word
I know. Pursuit?, no. Proof?, no. Don’ t call it fear.
Could I cross this white sheet if I were coward,

I knew a woman, lovely in her bones,
When small birds sighed, she would sigh back at them;
Ah, when she moved, she moved more ways than one:
The shapes a bright container can contain!
Of her choice virtues only gods should speak,
Or English poets who grew up on Greek
(I’ d have them sing in chorus, cheek to cheek).

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.

We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

1. The Winter: 1748
— Erasmus Darwin, 1731-1802

A little satin like wind at the door.
My mother slips past in great side hoops,
arced like the ears of elephants
on her head a goat-white wig,
on her cheek a dollop of mole.

At Samoa, hardly unpacked, I commenced planting,
When I’ d opened the chicken crates, built the Cochins a coop.
The Reverend Mr. Claxton called, found me covered with mud,
My clothes torn, my hair in a wad, my bare feet bleeding.
I had started the buffalo grass in the new-made clearing.
The next day the priest paid a visit. Civil but restless,
I was dying to plant the alfalfa seed — gave him a packet.