Words without much use
now. Unable to remake
the thing. And I thought
what should I think —
followed by: spring light looks
like feathers. (Birds
seemed conveniently
decorous.) What then
does this leave I asked
& was surprised to know
so quickly — that my understanding
of what the light & birds
could not be made to mean
would not detract
from them as they
were. Bound by feathers
(a thought, I will admit,
born of artifice alone)
Love not
being in the loop.
Grant the spruces’ wish,
the golf compound
graying out of use,
suvs in the it lot,
power outage,
a chorus from the quad.
Bless the elsewhere
where others are
not here or you.
It needn’ t be tinder, this juncture of the year,
a cigarette second guessed from car to brush.
The woods’ parchment is given
to cracking asunder the first puff of wind.
Yesterday a big sycamore came across First
and Hawthorne and is there yet.
But to whatever animal we ascribe these remains, it is certain such a one has existed in America, and that it has been the largest of all terrestrial beings. It should have sufficed to have rescued the earth it inhabited, and the atmosphere it breathed, from the imputation of impotence....
— Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia
I called for armour, rose, and did not reel.
But when I thought...
I could feel
My wound open wide.
— Thom Gunn, “The Wound”
THE STATES
As if sliding down the green, scuffed face
of the wave, a seaplane falls
and turns together, keeping the waters of
the ear flat: a dead calm. But when the window’ s
frowning strip of shoreline,
the battalions of tropical-drinks umbrellas
guarding the sandcastles and saltboxes
of the rich,
when these flip upside down, and the pale
I learned from my mother how to love
the living, to have plenty of vases on hand
in case you have to rush to the hospital
with peonies cut from the lawn, black ants
still stuck to the buds. I learned to save jars
large enough to hold fruit salad for a whole
grieving household, to cube home-canned pears
and peaches, to slice through maroon grape skins
and flick out the sexual seeds with a knife point.
I learned to attend viewings even if I didn’ t know
the deceased, to press the moist hands
can go to Bible study every Sunday
and swear she’ s still not convinced,
but she likes to be around people who are.
We have the same conversation
every few years — I’ ll ask her if she stops
to admire the perfect leaves
of the Japanese maple
she waters in her backyard,
or tell her how I can gaze for hours
at a desert sky and know this
as divine. Nature, she says,
doesn’ t hold her interest. Not nearly
as much as the greens, pinks, and grays
of a Diebenkorn abstract, or the antique
At times they will fly under. The dome
contains jungles. Invent a sky under the dome.
Creatures awake, asleep, at play, aglow:
they float – unbottled genii – under the dome.
Southern Belle, a splash of black, dusted with gold,
dissembles, assembling, acts shy under the dome.
Cattleheart, Giant Swallowtail, Clipper:
sail, navigate sky high under the dome.
Like confetti – a wedding – bits of Rice
Paper: sheer mimicry under the dome.
Magnificent Owl, in air, a pansy,
it feeds, wings up, eye to eye, under the dome.
Because she died where the ravine falls into water.
Because they dragged her down to the creek.
In death, she wore her blue broadcloth skirt.
Though frost blanketed the grass she cooled her feet in the spring.
Because I turned the log with my foot.
Her slippers floated downstream into the dam.
Because, after the thaw, the hunters discovered her body.
Because she lived without our mother.
Because she had inherited head rights for oil beneath the land.
She was carrying his offspring.
They sit together on the porch, the dark
Almost fallen, the house behind them dark.
Their supper done with, they have washed and dried
The dishes – only two plates now, two glasses,
Two knives, two forks, two spoons – small work for two.
She sits with her hands folded in her lap,
At rest. He smokes his pipe. They do not speak,
And when they speak at last it is to say
What each one knows the other knows. They have
One mind between them, now, that finally
For all its knowing will not exactly know
