The whole country
in a courtly dance
its tiny mouth open
I pour another cup of wine
and falling, rising
the children remove their toys
around the small apartment
to their bunk beds
not quite dark yet
early spring with snow
on the wind
the woman across the street
bent like a sickle
collecting bottles and cans
knocks, goes on
I wonder where she lives
and the stars shining
on her greasy clothes
We were young and it was an accomplishment
to have a body. No one said this. No one
said much beyond “throw me that sky” or
“can the lake sleep over?” The lake could not.
The lake was sent home and I ate too many
beets, went around with beet-blood tongue
worrying about my draft card-burning brother
going to war. Other brothers became holes
at first base at war, then a few holes
Harleying back from war in their always
it seemed green jackets with pockets galore
and flaps for I wondered bullets, I wondered
A cooler
head of lettuce prevailed, but when the actor
asked his question and paused
for us to watch him pause and think
inside the pause, I almost answered
as if we were in a bar, just the two of us
and a balcony and spotlight. The two of us
and programs and makeup and a sofa
from the director’ s living room and the black/
womb/agora/séance of theater inviting us to feel
together alone. I recall I don’ t recall
the question but its scope on his face
I know that rarity precedes extinction,
Like that of the purple orchid in my garden,
Whose sudden disappearance rattled me.
Jane, in her way, is also beautiful.
And therefore near extinction, I suppose.
She is certainly rare and fragile of bone.
She insists she is dying, day by dubious day,
And spends her evenings looking at photographs
Of her mother, who never believed in love.
Rare Jane, I worship you. But I can’ t deny
You access to the endless
With its river of cold stars.
We’ ve come back to the site of her
conception. She calls it why
and cries all night,
sleepless, wild.
It seems the way is always
floating and the goal —
to live so the ghosts we were
don’ t trail us and echo.
I think we are inside a flower,
under a pollen of stars vast as scattered sand.
The air pulses with perfume,
flowers calling to flowers and the ferrying air.
But my eyes are thin and elsewhere.
I am thinking, maybe
There are fewer introductions
In plague years,
Hands held back, jocularity
No longer bellicose,
Even among men.
Breathing’ s generally wary,
Labored, as they say, when
The end is at hand.
But this is the everyday intake
Of the imperceptible life force,
Willed now, slow —
Well, just cautious
In inhabited air.
As for ongoing dialogue,
No longer an exuberant plosive
To make a point,
But a new squirreling of air space,
A new sense of boundary.
Genghis Khan said the hand
Water spurts incredibly
Clear up under simple feel
And that is how
We drank water
1. a night in the barn
The deer carcass hangs from a rafter.
Wrapped in blankets, a boy keeps watch
from a pile of loose hay. Then he sleeps
and dreams about a death that is coming:
Inside him, there are small bones
scattered in a field among burdocks and dead grass.
He will spend his life walking there,
gathering the bones together.
Pigeons rustle in the eaves.
At his feet, the German shepherd
snaps its jaws in its sleep.
1
After our march from the Hudson to the top
of Cemetery Hill, we Boy Scouts proudly endured
the sermons and hot sun while Girl Scouts
lolled among graves in the maple shade.
When members of the veterans’ honor guard
aimed their bone-white rifles skyward and fired,
I glimpsed beneath one metal helmet
the salmon-pink flesh of Mr. Webber’ s nose,
restored after shrapnel tore it.
Snapping turtles in the pond eat bass, sunfish,
and frogs. They do us no harm when we swim.
But early this spring two Canada geese
lingered, then built a nest. What I’ d
heard of, our neighbor feared: goslings,
as they paddle about, grabbed from below
by a snapper, pulled down to drown.
So he stuck
hunks of fat on huge, wire-leadered hooks
attached to plastic milk-bottle buoys.
The first week he caught three turtles
