Darling, I leave you the forever unblooming
twig half-sunk in spring mud & the Nature that allows
such delicate & lasting atrocity.
Darling, darling, darling: my voice is a branch that would reach.
I leave you the ragged sky, once full of cloud & now
not. I leave you these things just as I leave
you: graceful passage from one something to the next.
Darling, even in this my voice dissipates
and hue
to have unheld a scale —
silver dishes little mirrors on their chains —
they go that way, This
and hoist
It’s not like looking into a pool,
to let your intelligence run away with you
Come back quarter size, apricot moon
A changeling is a child who
appeared under cover
of the ordinary, in exchange
To strip away this incessant chatter,
yes, but what lies underneath it?
Death, of course, or our fear of death.
Which is why we talk so much,
bury our heads in books, turn forests
into pages and pages into mirrors
in which we see ourselves appear
and disappear. When I look up
from the story I've been reading
about the Jews in Nazi Germany
and the silence that closed their
mouths forever, I see a girl outside
the cafe smiling in at her father
who smiles back but cannot hear her.
You would have thought it foolish to speak to the dead,
but I have lived two decades longer now than you
and all this time I have carried you in my head
so I think I have the right to question what you said,
dear teacher. My religious upbringing’s residue,
you would have thought it foolish. To speak to the dead,
however, is sometimes necessary, especially haunted
by all the things I know you hoped I’d do
with all this time that I have carried you in my head.
In a dream last night I followed where you led
Someone said
that working through difficult equations
was like walking
in a pure and beautiful landscape –
the numbers glowing
like works of art.
And in the same crowded room
a woman I thought I didn’t like
was singing to herself –
talking and listening
1.
Snow clouds shadow the bay, on the ice the odd fallen gull.
I try to keep my friend from dying by remembering
his childhood of praise to God, who needs us all. Würzburg:
the grownups are inside saying prayers for the dead,
the children are sent out to play — their laughter
more sacred than prayer. After dark his father
blesses and kisses him Güttenacht. He wakes
to go to school with children who stayed behind
and were murdered before promotion.
I’ve expanded like the swollen door in summer
to fit my own dimension. Your loneliness
is a letter I read and put away, a daily reminder
in the cry of the magpie that I am
still capable of inflicting pain
at this distance.
Like a painting, our talk is dense with description,
half-truths, landscapes, phrases layered
with a patina over time. When she came into my life
I didn’t hesitate.
Heureux ceux qui ont la clim
Pendant la grande canicule.
Heureux those whose culs are cool.
Heureuse her and heureux him.
C’est la canicule qui hurle,
Ready to tear you limb from limb.
Heureux ceux qui ont la clim,
Cri-criant: ‘O turlútuturle! ’
La situation est grim,
The mise-en-scène a trifle burle.
À chaleur disons donc: ‘Ta gueule! ’
And keep ourselves amused and slim.
The message I found on the Post-it note
went thus: love truth; expect to be found out.
Kid-style capitals proved I wrote it, but
left no clue why I'd swelled into a fat
clause no editor could edit; then, an entry
on a shrink's list of patient slang for sex —
her desk Norwegian teak, the mug of tea
on which she had affixed her Post-it notes
hot against her knuckle, their lips of stickum
loosening... And yet, I knew the note
to peel away at hour's end would terminate
our sessions — cool as the draft her linen
If no one ever marries me, —
And I don't see why they should,
For nurse says I'm not pretty,
And I'm seldom very good —
If no one ever marries me
I shan't mind very much;
I shall buy a squirrel in a cage,
And a little rabbit-hutch:
I shall have a cottage near a wood,
And a pony all my own,
And a little lamb quite clean and tame,
That I can take to town:
And when I'm getting really old, —
At twenty-eight or nine —
I shall buy a little orphan-girl
And bring her up as mine.
