I remember the perm fondue of your hair,
like blonde glass curled in the sun. It
had a kind and northern associative quality,
something I think quite remote in these parts.
That says enough for politics. Still,
the quiet can be integral, in an easy kinda way.
We open up to a stoop, and down the railing
is a poinsettia meadow waiting for you as if
you had seen it before, in the cold country yard
of your youth—one, mind you, you’ve never had.
But nerve can only get you so far, here in the bushes
and the padlocks, minding the temper of watches,
the spruce linen you wake to when no one else
can be there quite yet to wake beside you,
idle and remote on the cloud-mewing hills.
A dervish these late autumn days. These hills.
A sense that sprinkled weeds have a memory
of their own, a piano we spot in a corner room,
beside tea circles of past lives, and garden women.
All the hair has rushed and left from this moment.
Only a pearl for the mouth, only a leaf for the ear.
It is enough, to be bogged down in materiality.
The sentient patience of glaciers, dairy products.
Like the cowish sun, taking his time, bracing the hips
of the day, and staggering finally (sure bovine grace).
What comes of us now? Alone in the cupboard,
trying to remember who we are, and why that dress
by the patio has a voice in it, like the wind even.
Its rustle is a part of this place, and the ceiling
is a partly tin, partly the huge arms of sleep.
I remember the hand of hands,
the bland studded caskets, the dew-brown regality
of this hour, its open pocked-mark wildness.
I remember the climber fountains, and the drip-drop
that we left in the sink, beside hooded dishes.
Blue carpets of Zurich, and the exciting melancholy
of finding sheet music covered up in grandfatherly dust.
That’s enough this time out. The mind, it is true,
has irritable spots—like a large, whitened cornea—
it can absorb too much light, too little heat,
it is stony and diffident, and perhaps knows too much
the sorrow of chairs. So open the book.
The people of Baltimore, Atlanta and Macedonia.
Etruscan servicemen against bronze-browed snow.
And even a little flag for the throat, that you can remove,
glide into, glide out of. Sausage grinds, castanets, bands.
They say a lover’s throat is a vase of flowers. But
no one has yet scented the flower of that other dusk,
that compass map which one rolls up stealthily.
The coordinates are changing now. The headlines
of water and skinny bowls of moonlight prattle on.
Chirping watersheds. Catastrophic bees. Brittle paints.
And then mercantile rivulets that blush in your palm.
Shoulders ache. Red beaches row out into the marsh.
The earth, by seconds, becomes a bearded secretary.
Weepy lemons. Shucked ice. Cartelized pâté.
That should be enough to keep the kids going.
I am grazing over cotton fields, rows of homes.
Silver disks of plain things, and that’s nice.
Why is that we also say no thank you when we mean
the weather has a Biblical ring to it, or just
amazing fractures—like missing you. A terrace.
Chaos. Iguanas. Paintings of naked shuttles and crocus.
The war’s going well. And spaces for colors.
I have a form for you. I have a railroad to comb
for you. I have a sink for you. Dirt morsels go
kerplunk. Also, the cider watch taps out seed.
I have a memory of dying for you. Unbreakable
breakfasts. Here's a consternated ski lift of dreams
to peddle past, and once the rip-chord accentuates
this remaining gravel, and the accelerating pace slows
into its usual, grouchy rhythm, that will be it, friend.
The muckraking and mudwarping bargains again.
For the time is not anything if not collared.
The weir: smooth slope. The slop: mighty.
Meanwhile, mother calls from her backdoor pantry,
with an odd eye out, and plenty of good will.
MAY 2009