She took the spareribs out of the oven
and set them steaming on a plate
before leaving her apartment.
I didn't know how long to wait,
tore into cold meat when I decided
my mother wasn't coming back.
*
No one knew about the gun she kept
in her purse until the authorities
called — a.38 caliber pistol
with a pearl handle and a trigger
even she could easily pull —
her car still waiting to be towed
from a roadside ditch
when they arrived on the scene.
*
The silver swan, who living had no note,
When death approached, unlocked her silent throat;
Leaning her breast against the reedy shore,
Thus sung her first and last, and sung no more:
“Farewell, all joys; Oh death, come close mine eyes;
More geese than swans now live, more fools than wise.”
Brook and road
Were fellow-travellers in this gloomy Pass,
And with them did we journey several hours
At a slow step. The immeasurable height
Of woods decaying, never to be decayed,
The stationary blasts of waterfalls,
And in the narrow rent, at every turn,
Winds thwarting winds bewildered and forlorn,
The torrents shooting from the clear blue sky,
The rocks that muttered close upon our ears,
Black drizzling crags that spake by the wayside
As if a voice were in them, the sick sight
They are not angels
though they have the hollow look
of beings bred on ether. There’ s an air
of cool removal from your life, the hawk’ s
indifference to the hare’ s terror.
You see it in their palms, raised casually
against the fresco’ s surface, as to glass
of submarine or spacecraft, and you see
it in their eyes, oracular, that let you pass
alone to unknown agony. The song
The puppy must be learned of all this material.
No map of the hospital. First, the war effort.
Then, the war itself. The water makes and remakes
its walls. No persons or boats are allowed in them.
The skin of sleep
is thin. It will not hold.
Its contents stumble out.
A nub of bone
lodged in earth
at the bottom of a pit.
A stranger staring
down from the rim.
The skin of sleep is thin.
It cannot hold.
Lost names spill out.
Children engraved
in ash. A sea of blood.
Only you, tenderness,
stillborn, beneath
the skin of sleep.
The sale began — young girls were there,
Defenseless in their wretchedness,
Whose stifled sobs of deep despair
Revealed their anguish and distress.
And mothers stood, with streaming eyes,
And saw their dearest children sold;
Unheeded rose their bitter cries,
While tyrants bartered them for gold.
Heard you that shriek? It rose
So wildly on the air,
It seem’ d as if a burden’ d heart
Was breaking in despair.
Saw you those hands so sadly clasped —
The bowed and feeble head —
The shuddering of that fragile form —
That look of grief and dread?
As Ann came in one summer’ s day,
She felt that she must creep,
So silent was the clear cool house,
It seemed a house of sleep.
And sure, when she pushed open the door,
Rapt in the stillness there,
Her mother sat, with stooping head,
Asleep upon a chair;
Fast — fast asleep; her two hands laid
Loose-folded on her knee,
So that her small unconscious face
When they come
filling the yard with their overheard,
broke-glass catastrophes of voice,
overcrowded party line,
he lets the screen door clap
to see them plume
the settle back to the fence,
aftershocks of crowd and wail.
When they come
he says again he was home at breakfast
radio preacher doing love thy neighbor
and then the bomb,
just ask the wife.
The silence
in the TV's cathode glow
slowly fills with questions
as starlings shutter light
then weigh the lines, voices
