Whatever ’ tis, whose beauty here below
Attracts thee thus and makes thee stream and flow,
And wind and curl, and wink and smile,
Shifting thy gate and guile;
Though thy close commerce nought at all imbars
My present search, for eagles eye not stars,
And still the lesser by the best
And highest good is blest;
With what deep murmurs through time’ s silent stealth
Doth thy transparent, cool, and wat’ ry wealth
Here flowing fall,
And chide, and call,
As if his liquid, loose retinue stay’ d
Ling’ ring, and were of this steep place afraid;
The common pass
Where, clear as glass,
All must descend
Not to an end,
But quicken’ d by this deep and rocky grave,
In the northwest corner of Dakota, I saw a room
someone had left, a plush sofa returning its button-
eyed stare to the glance she gave it over her shoulder,
the dog, too, turning. In the next room, the mattress,
with mattress stories one after another tumbling
out of each spring, the window she opened first thing,
its vista of mile after mile, and the windmill hauling
its load.
I saw that, and nothing alive —
On abandon, uncalled for but called forth.
The hydrangea
Of her crushed each year a little more into the attar of herself.
Pallid. Injured, wildly capable.
A throat to come home to, tupelo.
Lemurs in parlors, inconsolable.
Parlors of burgundy and sleigh. Unseverable fear.
Wistful, woke most every afternoon
At the table, at the grave not knowing
whether to grieve or celebrate, they seemed
to find a way within the stalled noon clatter
and the dusk over oily swamps and elder tangle
along a locked stockade of heavy machines,
as the blue heron, looking down, flew farther on.
Nothing dissolved for them the mortal green
and black in transparent power of spacious streams
now gone from earth. The flickering they found,
terror-hope-terror, in fire of sunset clouds
remained unwavering in its progress to night
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.
Before I was born, I saw a tissue of ingenious detours, an inextricable tangle
wreathed with mistake.
Perhaps the ghost does not limp away, but rather forests flee me, frightened.
Look, they are setting a place for loss, clearing the table for the first glow of
antiquity.
Here we see William T. Walters in his little library illuminated, carefully
smoothing the lip of the continent.
What form bounds forward from behind but The Atlantic Railroad Coastline Co.?
The whole Roman Empire was sold by ascending auction in 193 A. D.
On the first warm day,
the aides fret about his pate,
fetch his hat. I push him
out the automatic doors
into the pallid sun.
Dad thinks we should
stay put until all the Indians
are back in their tepees,
but right now he’ s off to teach
a Latin class. Where are his keys?
They’ re a few miles away,
in the past, where he’ s no longer
active in the community.
I steer him along the asphalt paths
of the grounds: bark mulch,
first green shoots,
puddle of coffee by a car.
Now footsteps on shingle. Make of it what you will. Seabirds roost
on the breakwaters, accustomed, of course, to twilight.
The spirit lamp in that house on the headland could easily fall and spill
and the fire burn all night. Some time later a subtle ghost,
yourself in memory perhaps, might well set foot
up there amid clinker and smoke, the whole place silent and still
except you bring in the tic of cooling timbers, and then the birds in flight.
•
Now chains through gravel. Make of it what you will.
I was so worried the hickory I recognized
had died from salt burn in the last hurricane
I may have passed by vervain and apple haw
like they didn’ t matter, but this spring
it put out seven shoots from its base.
Still, the oldest trick is the moon missing,
then the “new” moon appears,
though we know it’ s the old one, and we pretend
to be taken in like the mother or baby
behind the bath towel.
Really it’ s the moon winking,
being the stone that holds stones and now footprints.
