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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.

Love is the kindest
expression
of absence —

Or else
is a day
by the river,

in which by
motion
it becomes clear —

there have been
in an hour an
infinite train

of rivers, & which
did you want
to see? One

comes slowly
to realize
there is no evading things

(the heart will have
its way, though
its will go

unfulfilled),
& there is no shame
in this.

The pleasures in this world —
soft breeze, soft
thighs, a bit of music,

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.

You’ re stepping on your father, my mother said,
and indeed I was standing exactly in the center
of a bed of grass, mown so neatly it could have been
my father’ s grave, although there was no stone saying so.

You’ re stepping on your father, she repeated,
louder this time, which began to be strange to me,
since she was dead herself; even the doctor had admitted it.

I moved slightly to the side, to where
my father ended and my mother began.

Defier of closed space, such as the head, opener
Of the sealed passageways, so that
Sunlight entering the nose can once again

Exit the ear, vaporizer, mist machine, whose
Soft hiss sounds like another human being

But less erratic, more stable, or, if not like a human being,
Carried by one, by my mother to the sick chamber
Of my childhood — as Freud said,

Why are you always sick, Louise? his cigar
Confusing mist with smoke, interfering
With healing—Embodied

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.

We sat in the park, but there was a war between us,
A dead moon over us and all around us
The shy and secret whisperings as of the tiny
Woods animals which in the high forest gather
Wind-fallen goods before the frost comes.

All night long I hear the sleepers toss
Between the darkened window and the wall.
The madman’ s whimper and the lover’ s voice,
The worker’ s whisper and the sick child’ s call —
Knowing them all

I’ d walk a mile, maybe, hearing some cat
Crying its guts out, to throttle it by hand,
Such simple love I had. I wished I might —
Or God might — answer each call in person and
Each poor demand.

1.

Betrayed by his five mechanic agents, falling
Captive to consciousness, he summons light
To all its duties, and assumes the world
Like a common penance. Rust on the green tongue burns
Like history’ s corrosive on his living tree.
But all the monsters of his sleep’ s dark sea
Are tame familiars in the morning sun.

2.