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
Poor muse, north wind, or any god
who blusters bleak across the lake
and sows the earth earth-deep with ice.
A hoar of fur stung across the vines:
here the leaves in full flush, here
abandoned to four and farther winds.
Bless us, any god who crabs the apples
and seeds the leaf and needle evergreen.
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.
The hummingbird hovers over bougainvillea, darting in and out
of blossoms as the bride throws
her corset among laughter and waving hands. Seeing you, glass in hand, sunlight
piercing the punch bowl’ s crystal, I remember
the horse, an Appaloosa, the white and gray markings
like clouds, cumulus, one
Here we are
in our doughboys and camos, our doughty frocks
with drips of bitter on the sleeve, our passions revving
their pulp to pittance at a gas station
in the city that never peeps —
A daughter is not a passing cloud, but permanent,
holding earth and sky together with her shadow.
She sleeps upstairs like mystery in a story,
blowing leaves down the stairs, then cold air, then warm.
We who at sixty should know everything, know nothing.
We become dull and disoriented by uncertain weather.
We kneel, palms together, before this blossoming altar.
As a teenager
she was like any other,
boys, the craic,
smoking down the backs.
Later there was talk
she broke things,
furniture and glass,
her mother’ s heart.
‘Mad at the world,’
the old women nod,
round each other’ s faces.
But it was more
than that
and for less
she was punished.
That weekend
she didn’ t leave a cup alone
every chair hit the wall,
Philomena’ s revenge.
Soon after
she was shifted
and given the shocks.
Between the imaginary iceberg and the skeletal whale
is the stuffed and mounted mermaid in her case,
the crudely-stitched seam between skin and scale
so unlike Herbert Draper’ s siren dreams, loose
on the swelling tide, part virgin and part harpy.
Her post-mortem hair and her terrible face
look more like P. T. Barnum’ s Freak of Feejee,
piscene and wordless, trapped in the net of a stare.
She has the head and shrivelled tits of a monkey,
One does not want,
O Lord, to heap
Up by still waters
Of words a cairn
But hopes to attend
A small covert
Of tamarisk
Whose leaves salty
Yet feathery
Will shed light over
A thickened plot.
One wants at last
To cede the field
To tamarisk
And mastic tree,
To olive and stone,
Stones in the fruit,
Seed in the stones.
Sometimes the rain shines
Just when the sun reigns,
And that was the way it is
Beyond those French doors
That late afternoon here
In this mind’ s early evening
Where they still fade in
That cool color Polaroid,
Pastel shades of her prom dress,
A bowl of double peonies,
Promising, precocious,
Trying, trying to open.
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