Long scree of pill bottles
spilling over the tipped brim
of the wicker basket, fifty or more,
a hundred,
your name on every one and under
your name the brusque rune of instructions —
which ones to take, how many, and often,
on what days,
In the barn demoted to garage,
the ax in a cherry stump can’ t be budged.
Daylight perforates siding despite
the battered armor of license plates —
corroded colors, same state: decay,
their dates the only history
of whoever tilled the soil
and left, as a welcome, the skull
of a possum nailed to the door, and the trail
of lime to the torn sack
in a corner where cobwebs festoon a scythe.
Rusted sharp, it sings
when he grips its splintery handle, swings,
and crowns topple from Queen Anne’ s lace.
(Bubbling and spuming
as if trying to talk under
water, I address you thus:)
Must I pretend not to love
you (in your present bloom,
your present perfection — soul
encased in fleshly relevance)
so you won’ t believe me
just another seabed denizen
vying for your blessed attention?
Some of us (but not you)
are so loosely moored
to our bodies we can
barely walk a straight line,
remaining (most days) only
marginally conscious.
We stagger and shudder
as buckets of blood or sperm
Amber husk
fluted with gold,
fruit on the sand
marked with a rich grain,
treasure
spilled near the shrub-pines
to bleach on the boulders:
your stalk has caught root
among wet pebbles
and drift flung by the sea
and grated shells
and split conch-shells.
Beautiful, wide-spread,
fire upon leaf,
what meadow yields
so fragrant a leaf
as your bright leaf?
Rose, harsh rose,
marred and with stint of petals,
meagre flower, thin,
sparse of leaf,
more precious
than a wet rose
single on a stem —
you are caught in the drift.
Stunted, with small leaf,
you are flung on the sand,
you are lifted
in the crisp sand
that drives in the wind.
Can the spice-rose
drip such acrid fragrance
hardened in a leaf?
I’ m wondering where you are now
Married, or mad, or free:
Wherever you are you’ re likely glad,
But memory troubles me.
We could’ ve had us children,
We could’ ve had a home —
But you thought not, and I thought not,
And these nine years we roam.
Today I worked in the deep dark tanks,
And climbed out to watch the sea:
Gulls and salty waves pass by,
And mountains of Araby.
Must Sean Penn always look like he’ s squeezing
the last drops out of a sponge and the sponge
is his face? Even the back of his head grimaces.
Just the pressure in his little finger alone
could kill a gorilla. Remember that kid
whose whole trick was forcing blood into his head
until he looked like the universe’ s own cherry bomb
so he’ d get the first whack at the piñata?
He’ s grown up to straighten us all out
about weapons of mass destruction
but whatever you do, don’ t ding his car door with yours.
Wandered tonight through a city
as ruined as a body with broken
ribs and a bared heart. Looked for you
there with cookies in my pocket, searched
for a sigh, for movement in demolished
streets and alleys. Tonight
since I’ d forgotten for a moment where you are,
I searched for you with hope in my bones.
But no matter how I lured you with my voice
and my eyes, walls of debris
With refreshments and some modesty and home-drawn maps,
the ladies of the parish are marshaling the plans in hand,
devising the occasions, in softest pencil: the Day of Hearsay,
Leeway Week, the Maybe Pageant, a hustings on the word
nearby. Half-promised rain roosts in some clouds a mile out,
gradual weather making gradual notes on the green, the well,
the monument, the mayor's yard where dogs purr on elastic.
Seawater stiffens cloth long after it’ s dried.
As pain after it’ s ended stays in the body:
A woman moves her hands oddly
because her grandfather passed through
a place he never spoke of. Making
instead the old jokes with angled fingers.
Call one thing another’ s name long enough,
it will answer. Call pain seawater, tree, it will answer.
Call it a tree whose shape of branches happened.
Call what branching happened a man
whose job it was to break fingers or lose his own.
