The way a tired Chippewa woman
Who’ s lost a child gathers up black feathers,
Black quills & leaves
That she wraps & swaddles in a little bale, a shag
Cocoon she carries with her & speaks to always
As if it were the child,
Until she knows the soul has grown fat & clever,
That the child can find its own way at last;
Well, I go everywhere
Out in the orchards the dogs stood
Almost frozen in the bleak spring night
& Mister dragged out into the rows
Between his peach trees the old dry limbs
Building at regular intervals careful pyres
While the teeth of the dogs chattered & snapped
& the ice began to hang long as whiskers
From the globes along the branches
& at his signal we set the piles of branches ablaze
Tending each carefully so as not to scorch
So the tide forgets, as morning
Grows too far delivered, as the bowls
Of rock and wood run dry.
What is left seems pearled and lit,
As those cases
Of the museum stood lit
With milk jade, rows of opaque vases
Streaked with orange and yellow smoke.
You found a lavender boat, a single
Figure poling upstream, baskets
It was the summer of 1976 when I saw the moon fall down.
It broke like a hen’ s egg on the sidewalk.
The garden roiled with weeds, hummed with gnats who settled clouds on my
oblivious siblings.
A great hunger insatiate to find / A dulcet ill, an evil sweetness blind.
A gush of yolk and then darker.
Somewhere a streetlamp disclosed the insides of a Chevy Impala — vinyl seats, the rear- view,
headrests and you, your hand through your hair.
An indistinguishable burning, failing bliss.
Doors open and shut.
We’ ve come to the place where nothing shines.
I hear eternity
Is self-forgetting. Interiors warm with the nightmare of guests and poetry
And you. Everything darkly
Reverent years of reading about death eluded.
Bled
Back from the ear sidestepping your bullets bloom in on ye lay
Rock. Rud. Spread
So swiftly tastes like mud. Dredged mud off
The corpse sled hushed down woodsmoke.
Said the stars thrum on Marie
Marie. Hold on tight.
In the depths of outer space
Is man.
1
1
I seek a permanent home, but this structure has an appearance of indifferent compoundedness and isolation, heading toward hopelessness.
The boy pulls an animal on a leash.
The house with a red roof rests between two hills.
I can look through its windows to the sea.
His aggression opposes what in a domestic animal, cold open space, large enough to work with isolation?
House is the projection, space around it intermediary, theater.
I’ m here, one fat cherry
blossom blooming like a clod,
one sad groat glazing, a needle puling thread,
so what, so sue me. These days what else to do but leer
at any boy with just the right hairline. Hey! I say,
That’ s one tasty piece of nature. Tart Darkling,
if I could I’ d gin, I’ d bargain, I’ d take a little troll
this moolit night, let you radish me awhile,
5 am. One-quarter past.
Distant chimes inform me this.
A bell peal knells the mist.
And sunlight’ s
not yet bludgeoning.
But some light gets blood going.
Last night it was snowing
and now
every path’ s a pall.
Though mine the only footfalls
at this hour of awe. Above
hangs a canopy of needle leaf.
Below, the season’ s
mean deceit —
that everything stays
white and clean.
It doesn’ t, of course,
but I wish it. My prayers
is my season
of defeat.
Though all
is green
and death
is done,
I feel alone.
As if the stone
rolled off
from the head
of the tomb
is lodged
in the doorframe
of my room,
and everyone
I’ ve ever loved
lives happily
just past
my able reach.
And each time
Jesus rises
I’ m reminded
of this marble
fact:
they are not
coming back.
