Last night in bed
I mouthed a prayer
of my own composition.
It sounded offhand, it was carelessly
addressed, it twisted my meaning
entirely, it left an ache,
I didn’ t know what I was doing.
So I took down my yellowed copy
of French With Pictures
by the late literary critic I. A. Richards
and I put my petition
into soft French words.
Mother died last night,
Mother who never dies.
Winter was in the air,
many months away
but in the air nevertheless.
It was the tenth of May.
Hyacinth and apple blossom
bloomed in the back garden.
We could hear
Maria singing songs from Czechoslovakia —
How alone I am —
songs of that kind.
How alone I am,
no mother, no father —
my brain seems so empty without them.
Aromas drifted out of the earth;
the dishes were in the sink,
rinsed but not stacked.
As the immense dew of Florida
Brings forth
The big-finned palm
And green vine angering for life,
As the immense dew of Florida
Brings forth hymn and hymn
From the beholder,
Beholding all these green sides
And gold sides of green sides,
And blessed mornings,
Meet for the eye of the young alligator,
And lightning colors
So, in me, come flinging
Forms, flames, and the flakes of flames.
In the beginning, a word, move;
then a plan and then the reasons,
which I do not remember exactly.
I remember clearly only the clothes
we were given for the journey
and the last, silent meal we ate.
We left the place as lightly as we
had come, so many years before.
You died. And because you were Greek they gave you
a coin to carry under your tongue and then also
biscuits and honey. When you came to the riverbank
you saw a crazy-looking black bumboat on the water
with a figure standing in it, lanky and dressed
darkly, holding a sweep. You were taken across,
and you gave your coin for the passage, and continued
east
the whole moon
burns behind jamestown
seven wings of geese
light the thin ice
west
the asian sun
bloody on the interstate
spring flowers
break on the gray prairie
exit
fingerprints
on the rearview mirror
feral shadows
transposed near fargo
You hear the roadhouse before you see it,
Its four-beat country tunes
Amplified like surf through the woods,
Silencing bullfrog and red-tailed hawk,
Setting beards of moss dancing
On dim, indeterminate trees
That border two-lane blacktop.
Docked tonight, you reveal the badge
Of the farmer, that blanched expanse of skin
Where cap shades face, babyhood
What I adore is not horses, with their modern
domestic life span of 25 years. What I adore
is a bug that lives only one day, especially if
it’ s a terrible day, a day of train derailment or
chemical lake or cop admits to cover-up, a day
when no one thinks of anything else, least of all
that bug. I know how it feels, born as I’ ve been
into these rotting times, as into sin. Everybody’ s
busy, so distraught they forget to kill me,
and even that won’ t keep me alive. I share
my home not with horses, but with a little dog
At the earliest ending of winter,
In March, a scrawny cry from outside
Seemed like a sound in his mind.
He knew that he heard it,
A bird’ s cry at daylight or before,
In the early March wind
The sun was rising at six,
No longer a battered panache above snow...
It would have been outside.
It was not from the vast ventriloquism
Of sleep’ s faded papier mâché...
The sun was coming from outside.
That scrawny cry — it was
A chorister whose c preceded the choir.
It was part of the colossal sun,
