I am the blossom pressed in a book,
found again after two hundred years....
I am the maker, the lover, and the keeper....
When the young girl who starves
sits down to a table
she will sit beside me....
I am food on the prisoner's plate....
I am water rushing to the wellhead,
filling the pitcher until it spills....
I am the patient gardener
of the dry and weedy garden....
I am the stone step,
the latch, and the working hinge....
Like words put to a song, the bunched tobacco leaves
are strung along a stick, the women
standing in the August heat for hours — since first light —
under the pitched tin roof, barefoot, and at their feet
the babies, bare-assed, dirty, eating dirt.
The older children hand the leaves from the slide,
three leaves at a time, stalks upright, three handers
for each stringer, and three more heaped canvas slides
This must happen just after I die: At sunrise
I bend over my grandparents' empty house in Hazelwood
and pull it out of the soft cindered earth by the Mon River.
Copper tubing and electric lines hang down like hairs.
The house is the size of a matchbox. I sprinkle bits
of broken pallets, seeded grass, fingernails, and tamarack
needles in the open door of the porch. I scratch a Blue Tip
and blow vowels of fire through the living room,
the tunneled hallway. Flames run up the wooden stairs.
I put my ear beside the hot kitchen window
Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art--
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors--
No--yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Small wonder
he’ s not been sighted all winter;
this old brock’ s
been to Normandy and back
through the tunnels and trenches
of his subconscious.
His father fell victim
to mustard-gas at the Somme;
one of his sons lost a paw
to a gin-trap at Lisbellaw:
another drills
on the Antrim hills’
still-molten lava
in a moth-eaten Balaclava.
An elaborate
system of foxholes and duckboards
I have met them in dark alleys, limping and one-armed;
I have seen them playing cards under a single light-bulb
and tried to join in, but they refused me rudely,
knowing I would only let them win.
I have seen them in the foyers of theaters,
coming back late from the interval
The world weeps. There are no tears
To be found. It is deemed a miracle.
The president appears on screens
In villages and towns, in cities in jungles
And jungles still affectionately called cities.
He appears on screens and reads a story.
Whose story is he reading and why?
What lessons are to be learned from this story
About a time that has not arrived, will not arrive, is here?
Time of fire and images of fire climbing toward the sun
Time of precious and semi-precious liquids
Time of a man and a woman doused in ink
1
invitation
come coil with me
here in creation’ s bed
among the twigs and ribbons
of the past. i have grown old
remembering the garden,
the hum of the great cats
moving into language, the sweet
fume of the man’ s rib
as it rose up and began to walk.
it was all glory then,
the winged creatures leaping
like angels, the oceans claiming
their own. let us rest here a time
like two old brothers
who watched it happen and wondered
what it meant.
2
how great Thou art
Brush your teeth, brush your teeth,
Give them all a treat.
Brush up and down and all around,
To keep them clean and neat.
In the morning and at night,
Clean them twice a day.
Brush up and down and all around,
Keep fillings well away.
Brush your teeth, brush your teeth,
Give them all a treat.
Brush up and down and all around,
To keep them clean and neat.
In the morning and at night,
Clean them twice a day.
Brush up and down and all around,
Keep fillings well away.
Brutal to give
the prisoner a window —
a blue sky glimpse —
as if an afterlife
existed. Brutal
for you to parade
in a body
in the same
room where I dream you.
