Baton Rouge, 1940
These are savannas bluer than your dreams
Where other loves are fashioned to older music,
And the romantic in his light boat
Puts out among flamingos and water moccasins
Looking for the river that went by last year.
Even the angels wear confederate uniforms;
And when the magnolia blooms and the honeysuckle,
Golden lovers, brighter than the moon,
Read Catullus in the flaring light
Of the burning Negro in the open eye of midnight.
At two thousand feet the sea wrinkles like an old man’s hand.
Closer, in a monotone of peristalsis,
Its fugue-like swells create and recreate
One image in an idiot concentration.
From horizon to horizon, this desert
With the eye athirst for something stable
When off to southeast-ward —
It was a plane all right, or had been,
A shipside fighter, her pontoons floated her.
Smashed like a match-case, no one could be sure
If it were ours or had been one of theirs.
The way my daughter sleeps it’s as if she’s talking
to the dead. Now she is one. I watch her eyes roll
backwards in her head, her senses fold
one by one, and then her breathing quiets to a beat.
Every night she fights this silent way of being
with all the whining ammunition that she has.
She wins a tired story, a smothered song, the small
and willful links to life that carry her away.
Welcome to the Egyptian burial. She’s gone to Hades
I will not tend. Or water,
pull, or yank,
I will not till, uproot,
fill up or spray.
The rain comes.
Or not. Plants: sun-fed,
moon-hopped, dirt-stuck.
Watch as flocks
of wild phlox
appear, disappear. My lazy,
garbagey magic
makes this nothing
happen.
I love
the tattered
camisole of
nothing. The world
runs its underbrush
course fed by
the nothing I give it.
Wars are fought.
Blood turns.
Dirt is a wide unruly room.
Don't bring haw into the house at night
or in any month with a red fruit in season
or when starlings bank against the light,
don't bring haw in. Don't give me reason
to think you have hidden haw about you.
Tucked in secret, may its thorn thwart you.
Plucked in blossom, powdered by your thumb,
I will smell it for the hum of haw is long,
its hold is low and lilting. If you bring
haw in, I will know you want me gone
to the fairies and their jilting. I will know
you want me buried in the deep green field
Because it hadn't seemed enough,
after a while, to catalogue
more Christmases, the three-layer cakes
ablaze with birthday candles, the blizzard
Billy took a shovel to,
Phil's lawnmower tour of the yard,
the tree forts, the shoot-'em-ups
between the boys in new string ties
and cowboy hats and holsters,
or Mother sticking a bow as big
as Mouseketeer ears in my hair,
Thunder blossoms gorgeously above our heads,
Great, hollow, bell-like flowers,
Rumbling in the wind,
Stretching clappers to strike our ears...
Full-lipped flowers
Bitten by the sun
Bleeding rain
Dripping rain like golden honey—
And the sweet earth flying from the thunder.
phlegmatic on my bier
no regrets — my body bears
truth stem to stern
beginning with the hips
who am of common stock
looking to the sea
face ground — nothing now
conjured from dust
suffering — hung by the heels
sought occasion
as will was never conquered
to see the host broken
a swinging scythe — the dance
this most pleasant to me
so make moan of the old days
say why should love live
Tune yr sandwich to the key of C
Make biscuits in kitchen B
Miss Scarlet with her lead pipe
Waits behind the cupboard door
Clubs one from the other limp
Only to begin again innocent
& nothing to do but gather into
Legion gather into constellation
Coming along then a spider its web
Holds the walls together holds the floor
Up gathers toward a central point
Mean & distribution derivation
To insert a thumb & see what sticks
Past the earth’s crust cirrus
Softly pummeled overnight, the lower
limbs of our Norway spruce
flexed and the deepening snow held them.
Windless sunlight now, so I go out
wearing hip waders and carrying
not a fly rod but a garden hoe. I begin
worrying the snow for the holdfast
of a branch that’s so far down
a wren’s nest floats above it like a buoy.
I work the hoe, not chopping but cradling,
then pull straight up. A current of air
as the needles loft their burden
over my head. Those grace notes
of the snowfall, crystals giving off
