for Dave Smith
Our clothes are still wet from wading
The Chickamunga last evening.
There is heavy frost. We have
Walked on the dead all night.
Now in the firelight
We are exchanging shells and grapeshot.
I can still hear our loud huzzah
When late in the day
The enemy fell into full retreat
Along the pine ridge to the east...
We chased them until we were weary.
Each night this week
There’s been something
To keep me from sleep. Just an hour ago
I saw
I was born as a woman, I talk you to death,
or else your ear off,
or else you to sleep. What do I have, all the time
in the world, and a voice that swings brass back
and forth, you can hear it, and a focal point where
my face should be. What do I have, I have absolute
power, and what I want is your money, your drool,
and your mind, and the sense of myself as a snake,
and a garter in the grass. Every bone in the snake
is the hipbone, every part of the snake is the hips.
It wasn't holy so let us not praise gods.
Let us not look to them for bread,
nor the cup that changed water to wine.
Let us look to the bend of the road
that reaches. A silver blur across
the skyline, woman standing on the farm.
In her grasp, the shine that is seed,
that is beginning. She will work
the earth, bounty in the vault
of cosmos above her, heat
lightning that lassoes in its manic
current. Man never existed
An idle lingerer on the wayside's road,
He gathers up his work and yawns away;
A little longer, ere the tiresome load
Shall be reduced to ashes or to clay.
No matter if the world has marched along,
And scorned his slowness as it quickly passed;
No matter, if amid the busy throng,
He greets some face, infantile at the last.
His mission? Well, there is but one,
And if it is a mission he knows it, nay,
To be a happy idler, to lounge and sun,
And dreaming, pass his long-drawn days away.
I
The veldt men pray
Carved wood and stone
And tear their flesh
To vein and bone.
The idols scowl
In the brassy sun
Unmindful of
Appeasement done.
Yea, warriors cringe,
Whose tauntings dare
The regnant brute
In regal lair.
As tribal gods
The brave confound,
They bruise their heads
Against the ground.
Kennings of death
Encyst the square,
The mourners drool
And children scare.
Outside the igloo he waited
for an invitation to come inside.
There was no knocker, no doorbell.
He coughed, there was no reply.
He crouched down and peered in.
He felt the warm air from a fire
pat his cheeks and ruffle his hair.
Hello he said quietly and repeated it.
The frost in his toes urged him in,
so did the pain in his gut. His knees
one by one welcomed the snow
and brought him into the warmth.
Touching your goodness, I am like a man
Who turns a letter over in his hand
And you might think this was because the hand
Was unfamiliar but, truth is, the man
Has never had a letter from anyone;
And now he is both afraid of what it means
And ashamed because he has no other means
To find out what it says than to ask someone.
Without intending to hide,
the imagined copperhead
hid on the path ahead,
unseen on bronze leaves, unheard,
and a mortal likelihood
at every step. This was childhood,
mine, the wood’ s jihad
against a boy who’ d
intruded among monkshood,
wasp, tick, and nettles haired
with needles. Scrub brush abhorred
him with a horde
of welts, bites, and stings, but he’ d
never seen a copperhead,
though he’ d looked hard
The noise throws down
twin shadows, hunting shadows
on a black joy ride.
They roar up the silver vein of the river
and out over the stony peaks,
which have been shrunken to a luminous
green musculature on the screens.
Who are the pilots, too high to see
the splayed hearts of deer tracks
under the apple trees, or smell
the cider in the fallen fruit?
Who are the vandals that ransack
the wilderness of clouds?
I arise from dreams of thee
In the first sweet sleep of night,
When the winds are breathing low,
And the stars are shining bright:
I arise from dreams of thee,
And a spirit in my feet
Hath led mewho knows how?
To thy chamber window, Sweet!
