Here they stood, whom the Kecoughtan first believed
gods from another world, one pair of longjohns
each, bad-yellow, knotted with lice,
the godless, bandy-legged runts
with ear bit off, or eye gouged,
who killed and prayed
over whatever flew, squatted, or swam.
It was not kindness, but I was only buckle-high in the door.
I let him in because the knock had come, the rain
clawed each window and wall. I was afraid.
Climbing down the stairs I did not know
how my country, cunningly, had rotted,
but hear, now, my steps creak in memory
and the rocks let go in the blind nightglass
where you get up, frightened, to reenact
the irrational logic of flesh.
There was a fire in the night.
Across the street I slept among the others
as the ashes snowed upon small pines.
I slept owning nothing, a child ignorant
of fortune’ s blistering story, the playful
flash in the dark, the unseen smolder
that would leave us revealed, unchanged.
I said my prayers for luck
but the man trying to live in two houses
answers me now, losing
neither the old one whose windows burst
with weariness, nor the one half-built
whose roofless, green timbers
The humble sense of being alive
under the towering sun
fills the nectary and ripens apricots
down to the last one,
if Mnemosyne wakens from apathy
each moment. It is the soft burly sound
of a bee tumbled in fritillary,
is it not?
But if memory, as if to illustrate
I was the lonely one in whom
they swarmed in the millions.
I was their creature and I
was grateful. I could sleep
when I wanted.
Look, above the creek, hummingbirds in the trumpet vine.
Not too close, wait. See the green blurs
stitching the leaves?
Here at the edge of the millennium
I don’ t imagine
you’ d call them anything as archaic as angels.
Twice through my bedroom window
I’ ve seen the horned owl drop from the oaks to panic
the rabbit in my neighbor’ s backyard.
Last night he paced for an hour across the top
of the cage, scrutinizing
the can of water, the mound of pellets,
turning his genius to the riddle
of the wire, while under him
the rabbit balled like a fat carnation in the wind.
We have all seen them circling pastures,
have looked up from the mouth of a barn, a pine clearing,
the fences of our own backyards, and have stood
amazed by the one slow wing beat, the endless dihedral drift.
But I had never seen so many so close, hundreds,
every limb of the dead oak feathered black,
with the medicinal poppies of June
nor with Celan’ s bloom-fest of dredged stone,
not with history’ s choo-choo train of corpses,
not with Nottingham’ s Robin Hood
nor Antwerp’ s Diamondland.
As we sipped and mingled,
regaled
with oldfangled
canapés and beguiled,
or entertained at least, by gargled
oldies, I disengaged
and angled
across grass tenderly groomed,
past where electric tiki torches gleamed,
and, alone, gazed,
now truly beguiled,
at my hosts’ grand
expensive vista, mortgaged,
yes, and, yes, remortgaged.
A low gold
moon glowed
against a plush black sky gauzed,
even filigreed,
with stars. Gowned
in old-growth oaks glazed
