As a teenager
she was like any other,
boys, the craic,
smoking down the backs.
Later there was talk
she broke things,
furniture and glass,
her mother’ s heart.
‘Mad at the world,’
the old women nod,
round each other’ s faces.
But it was more
than that
and for less
she was punished.
That weekend
she didn’ t leave a cup alone
every chair hit the wall,
Philomena’ s revenge.
Soon after
she was shifted
and given the shocks.
At a small monastery — or what had been
a monastery — outside Obrégon, we stopped;
you were suffering the hollow nausea of your first
pregnancy, sleeping as best you could
through the thousand miles of pines
and rocky fields of northern Mexico, so I went ahead
through the saddle-colored rooms, past
the broken church and the row of empty sheds,
where Indian women, according to a sign,
Apprentice morning come easily now,
silver with fog and the breakdowns
of neighbors: shouts from up hill
where the land curls under vines and under the porches
of oaks, where even now
wintergreen and inkberry shiver forth
streamers of new growth, and the green frogs
suck at the dew and sing their bent songs.
This time we are getting drunk on retsina
in somebody’ s Italian backyard. We are a long way
from Georgia
and all of us are lonely. I wave my arms
and caw like Hadrian after his lover drowned himself.
My wife walks by the pond singing a hymn;
I think she is leaving me for good. I say, Imagine
my heart is huge and has
little men
In the rental cottage it comes to me,
how the four lives of myself
and my brothers
crisscross
like tracer bullets,
and how, from a distance maybe,
if you had the right kind of glasses,
there might appear to be a target
we all were aiming at
beyond that black escutcheon of cloud
above Santa Rosa Bay
as we lie on the deck
drinking tequila and beer,
The ugly duckling remained ugly
its whole life but found others
as ugly as itself, I guess that’ s the message.
Smoke rises from the heads in the backyard.
Do you think if I hang around here long enough
someone will proffer a muffin,
one skulking shadow to another?
Soon, my shoes will be part of the populous dirt.
Have I learned all the wrong lessons,
the ones you shouldn’ t know until
the last dew-clogged lawn is mowed
and the sun goes down on the ruined battlements?
Why was I given a toy train if not
The women bow and flutter in the field.
The grain lies white with wind in the wide shadow.
Summer is dark, as in the ancient time.
This fair cloud that blooms in the northwest
Has darkened now, as in the ancient time,
And clouds are still at dawn on the soft mountains.
Husks after harvest we shall leave for rain
And our heels’ trace in the loam:
The stir of boughs has warned us,
Fruit in the grass reminds us...
The rake is like a wand or fan,
With bamboo springing in a span
To catch the leaves that I amass
In bushels on the evening grass.
I reckon how the wind behaves
And rake them lightly into waves
And rake the waves upon a pile,
Then stop my raking for a while.
Ravished lute, sing to her virgin ears,
Soft notes thy strings repeating;
Plucked harp, whose amorous song she hears,
Tell her the time is fleeting;
Night-tide and my distress of love
O speak, sweet numbers,
That pity her heart may move
Before she slumbers.
No but come closer. Come a little
Closer. Let the wall-eyed hornyhanded
Panhandler hit you for a dime
Sir and shiver. Snow like this
Drives its pelting shadows over Bremen,
Over sad Louvain and the eastern
Marshes, the black wold. It sighs
Into the cold sea of the north,
That vast contemptuous revery between
Antiquity and you. Turn up your collar,
