Wandered tonight through a city
as ruined as a body with broken
ribs and a bared heart. Looked for you
there with cookies in my pocket, searched
for a sigh, for movement in demolished
streets and alleys. Tonight
since I’ d forgotten for a moment where you are,
I searched for you with hope in my bones.
But no matter how I lured you with my voice
and my eyes, walls of debris
I went out walking
in the old neighborhood
Look! more trees on the block
forget-me-nots all around them
ivylantana shining
and geraniums in the window
Twenty years ago
it was believed that the roots of trees
would insert themselves into gas lines
then fallpoisonedon houses and children
This is about the women of that country
Sometimes they spoke in slogans
They said
We patch the roads as we patch our sweetheart’ s trousers
The heart will stop but not the transport
They said
We have ensured production even near bomb craters
Children let your voices sing higher than the explosions
Every town with black Catholics has a St. Peter Claver’ s.
My first was nursery school.
Miss Maturin made us fold our towels in a regulation square and nap on army cots.
No mother questioned; no child sassed.
In blue pleated skirts, pants, and white shirts,
we stood in line to use the open toilets
and conserved light by walking in darkness.
Unsmiling, mostly light-skinned, we were the children of the middle class, preparing to take our parents’ places in a world that would demand we fold our hands and wait.
In the backyard of our house on Norwood,
there were five hundred steel cages lined up,
each with a wooden box
roofed with tar paper;
inside, two stories, with straw
for a bed. Sometimes the minks would pace
back and forth wildly, looking for a way out;
or else they’ d hide in their wooden houses, even when
we’ d put the offering of raw horse meat on their trays, as if
The wooden scent of wagons,
the sweat of animals — these places
keep everything — breath of the cotton gin,
black damp floors of the icehouse.
The deer racing across a field
of the same clay and tallow
color they are — if they are:
or are they tricks of the light? —
must feel themselves being poured
and pouring through life. We’ re not built
but become: trembling columns
of apprehension that ripple
and pass those ripples to and fro
with the world that shakes around us —
it too is something poured
and ceaselessly pouring itself.
February shakes the fields
and trembles in each yellow willow.
Mama said
it only existed in storybooks
with its soft surface
of bluebells
but there it was
spinning so close to the earth
that it bent
every weather vane in Omaha
it was prom night
and I thought I’ d pluck a few
trumpets
to bring your Grandma
so I pulled our red ladder out
of the garage
and climbed to the roof
I stood up
and imagined I was balancing
the moon on my head
the narrow windows of Union
Station
gleamed like ice chips
Words torn, unseen, unseemly, scene
some far suburb’ s mall lot
Summer’ s theme: this year’ s humid
— to sweat is to know —
pen squeezed too tight yields
ink as blood or pus
so the phrase scraped, removed
offending thine eye: “Outsource Bush”
Against which, insource what? Who
will do it? Most terrible
predicate — high above mountains snow-capped
even in August in-flight motion
picture Eternal Sunshine of the
Spotless Mind infuriates many No
action, no funny, plot too
When we finally flip it over
the fireflies are out. The neighbor boy
has had his stitches in so I can finally admit
I think it is all fantastic: the suck
of the spark plug undone, the stuck blade
bent into the guard, and the sound
of the hammer’ s head reshaping the metal.
In this our suburban Eden we’ ve only
