After the cling of roots and then the “pock”
when they gave way
the recoil up the hand
was a small shock
of emptiness beginning to expand.
Milk frothing from the stems. Leaves inky green
and spiked.
Like blissed-out childhood play
turned mean
they snarled in tangled curls on our driveway.
On the day we moved in, the pings, bumps, and snaps
Were scary, it's true, but probably normal;
A house accepting new patterns of weight
With protest, the way no conviction goes gently.
We laughed a little, and called it "our spirit."
Later that night, when the power conked out
And the kids were crying, the ghost got a name,
"Daniel," and a history of whispered exploits,
All of them harmless, like nursery rhymes,
Or like the little fibs we tell ourselves
To explain why this or that has led to suffering.
If I when my wife is sleeping
and the baby and Kathleen
are sleeping
and the sun is a flame-white disc
in silken mists
above shining trees, —
if I in my north room
dance naked, grotesquely
before my mirror
waving my shirt round my head
and singing softly to myself:
“I am lonely, lonely.
I was born to be lonely,
I am best so!”
If I admire my arms, my face,
my shoulders, flanks, buttocks
against the yellow drawn shades, —
Who shall say I am not
the happy genius of my household?
The sun that puts its spokes in every
Wheel of manhandle and tree
Derives its path of seashines
(Sheer centrifugality) from my
Regards. I send it
My regards. Some yards
Of lumen from the fabrika
Have come unbolted from the look
Of it (or likes of me), a long
Unweaving or recarding I
Cannot recall begun, and there
Before my eyes a palm
Puts lashes round the sun.
I had a dream, which was not all a dream.
The bright sun was extinguish'd, and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space,
Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth
Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air;
Morn came and went — and came, and brought no day,
And men forgot their passions in the dread
Of this their desolation; and all hearts
Were chill'd into a selfish prayer for light:
And they did live by watchfires — and the thrones,
The palaces of crowned kings — the huts,
PROLOGUE
Animals tame and animals feral
prowled the Dark Ages in search of a moral:
the canine was Loyal, the lion was Virile,
rabbits were Potent and gryphons were Sterile.
Sloth, Envy, Gluttony, Pride — every peril
was fleshed into something phantasmic and rural,
while Courage, Devotion, Thrift — every bright laurel
crowned a creature in some mythological mural.
A daughter is not a passing cloud, but permanent,
holding earth and sky together with her shadow.
She sleeps upstairs like mystery in a story,
blowing leaves down the stairs, then cold air, then warm.
We who at sixty should know everything, know nothing.
We become dull and disoriented by uncertain weather.
We kneel, palms together, before this blossoming altar.
“While we’ re alive,” we kept
repeating. Tongues, throats,
roofs of our mouths bone dry,
skeletons we’ d someday
be...
Panicky masks we wore for
effect more than effect,
more real than we’ d admit...
After three months, Virginia is still a frontier.
Late at night, I close the door
on my husband practicing Mozart, the dishpan fills
and the network affiliates sign off one by one.
Now the country stations, tuning up like crickets
on radios in scattered valley kitchens:
Har yall this evenin folks!
(Wanting to say ‘I’ m real fine’ I whisper ‘Wow.’)
Got your Green Hill chicory perkin’? An army
of women, straightened and ironed and blued
like Picasso’ s ironer — jerking coffeecups
