Like words put to a song, the bunched tobacco leaves
are strung along a stick, the women
standing in the August heat for hours — since first light —
under the pitched tin roof, barefoot, and at their feet
the babies, bare-assed, dirty, eating dirt.
The older children hand the leaves from the slide,
three leaves at a time, stalks upright, three handers
for each stringer, and three more heaped canvas slides
Reading in bed, full of sentiment
for the mild evening and the children
asleep in adjacent rooms, hearing them
cry out now and then the brief reports
of sufficient imagination, and listening
at the same time compassionately
to the scrabble of claws, the fast treble
in the chimney —
then it was out,
not a trapped bird
In the Bavarian steeple, on the hour,
two figures emerge from their scalloped house
carrying sledges that they clap, in turn,
against the surface of the bell. By legend
they are summer and winter, youth and age,
as though the forces of plenty and of loss
played equally on the human soul, extracted
easily the same low bronze note spreading
The forest is the only place
where green is green and blue is blue.
Walking the forest I have seen
most everything. I’ ve seen a you
with yellow eyes and busted wing.
And deep in the forest, no one knew.
The motion of gathering loops of water
Must either burst or remain in a moment.
The violet colors through the glass
Throw up little swellings that appear
And spatter as soon as another strikes
And is born; so pure are they of colored
Hues, that we feel the absent strength
Of its power. When they begin they gather
Like sand on the beach: each bubble
Contains a complete eye of water.
Beneath her nest,
a shrew's head,
a finch's beak
and the bones
of a quail attest
the owl devours
the hour,
and disregards
the rest.
1
Several weeks ago I discovered a photograph of my mother
sitting in the sun, her face flushed as with achievement or triumph.
The sun was shining. The dogs
were sleeping at her feet where time was also sleeping,
calm and unmoving as in all photographs.
I wiped the dust from my mother’ s face.
Indeed, dust covered everything; it seemed to me the persistent
haze of nostalgia that protects all relics of childhood.
In the background, an assortment of park furniture, trees and shrubbery.
Mother died last night,
Mother who never dies.
Winter was in the air,
many months away
but in the air nevertheless.
It was the tenth of May.
Hyacinth and apple blossom
bloomed in the back garden.
We could hear
Maria singing songs from Czechoslovakia —
How alone I am —
songs of that kind.
How alone I am,
no mother, no father —
my brain seems so empty without them.
Aromas drifted out of the earth;
the dishes were in the sink,
rinsed but not stacked.
The birds have flown their summer skies to the south,
And the flower-money is drying in the banks of bent grass
Which the bumble bee has abandoned. We wait for a winter lion,
Body of ice-crystals and sombrero of dead leaves.
A month ago, from the salt engines of the sea,
A machinery of early storms rolled toward the holiday houses
Where summer still dozed in the pool-side chairs, sipping
An aging whiskey of distances and departures.
