For me. You were well-propped in your Tudor
Bed, surrounded by dark
German chocolates, in the tantrum of
Your convalescence that went on and on, though
No one was permitted to know the nature
Of your wound. I have heard
There will be war. Dove mistaken for an abject churl.
I’ve heard you’ve set up housekeeping in a factory
For brooms. You do not sweep.
I’ve heard pink underwings of prior
Wives will not be welcome in your home,
Like spores. I have heard you do go on.
A GIRL AGO
No feeding on wisteria. No pitch-burner traipsing
In the nettled woods. No milk in metal cylinders, no
Buttering. No making small contusions on the page
But saying nothing no one has not said before.
No milkweed blown across your pony-coat, no burrs.
No scent of juniper on your Jacobean mouth. No crush
Of ink or injury, no lacerating wish.
Extinguish me from this.
I was sixteen for twenty years. By September I will be a ghost
And flickering in unison with all the other fireflies in Appalachia,
Blinking in the swarm of it, and all at once, above
And on a bare branch in a shepherd’s sky. No Dove.
There is no thou to speak of.
TWO GIRLS AGO
No exquisite instruments.
No dead coming back as wrens in rooms at dawn.
No suicidal hankering; no hankering for suicide.
No one thousand days.
No slim luck for the only President I ever loved.
No lukewarm bath in oatmeal.
No lantern left for Natalie on the way home from school in her Alaskan dark.
No eye.
No Victorian slippers that walked the bogs to moor.
No Donner bones with cuts on them or not.
No horizontal weeping; no weeping vertically.
No flipping back your black tails at the black piano bench.
No Elgar, no Tallis, no post-industrial despair.
No French kissing in the field of wild raspberry and thorn.
No commissioned urn.
No threat. In the table of contents I’m not dead yet.
GAUDY INFINITESIMAL
By morning, you will be invisible, mon dream—
You are every rush-moth in your story, every torso, every bitch.
Now, you are distracting Moi.
This is my work, the infidelities of me, my own ivory hillocks, my toy
Pram filled with slippery mice, my own mares fetlock-deep in squalls
Of snow. This was at a time when certain vocables were wearing
Out, torn from being said too much.
When you come home again, each slightly lamed creature will gather
At our garden door. If I listen hard I’ll hear the unsewn
Stitching of their improbable and awkward gaits, each one
A little wobbly from the cruelty of the husbandry; your will be done.
HELLO BABIES, WELCOME TO EARTH
At the theme park in Homestead, past the steel mills along the Allegheny River’s
Crinkled bank, I went back home to see if I could grok the way the children
Felt about the Hurdy Gurdy Man, his lugubrious sweet music,
His little capuchin with pin-striped train conductor’s cap, held out.
It was a time in the world that was the snowball’s one last season on its way to Hell.
The earth loved us a little, I remember, said the note pinned in the seersuckered
Left breast pocket of the Surrealist’s suit, on his way to Cincinnati then, by rail.
Small chippy dogs would follow him; he carried bones of milk and scrap.
Only some of us have opposing thumbs but not to worry now.
Poppet, if you’ve anything to say, you should say it soon I think.
IV
BIRD, SINGING
Then, every letter opened was an oyster
Of possible bad news, pried apart to reveal
The imperfect probable pearl of your death.
Then, urgent messages still affrighted me, sharp
Noises caused the birds not yet in flight to fly.
Then, this was the life of you.
All your molecules
Gathered for your dying off
Like mollusks clinging to a great ship’s hull.
Ceremony of wounds, tinned,
Tiny swaddled starlings soaked in brine.
A bird, singing in his wicker cage, winds down.
Now, a trestle table lined with wooden platters
Neat with feathered wings of quail tucked-in.
Until you sever the thing, from self, it feels.
Thereafter it belongs to none.
You have nothing to be afraid of, anymore.
Outside Prague, I find you warm
Among the million small gold bees set loose
In April’s onion snow, quietly
Quietly, would you sing this back to me, out loud?
THE PIANIST
Ivory sailcloth of the nuptial bed, the last fantasia, pulsing, lit.
I was besotted with the fever of the setting free.
Feedbag of meal, the feeling of oats, so soft at the muzzle of me.
Then they moved me to a sow-shaped exurb; I did not prosper there.
If you would leave at daybreak, by night I’d wait for you, at everywhere.
Your licensed massage therapist
Loves you more concretely than I do. I, abstract, adoring, distant
And unsalvageable. She said, Give up, be palpable—all Hand.
I took to the tawny river and swam into the theater
Of the darkened chamber music hall.
I loved with all my heart my fear.
You were just an hallucination on my own slow way to sea.
On the common, there were swans
Pretending to be boats that carried people
Who imagined they felt joy.
ON HAVING CONTRACTED THE HABIT OF BELIEVING IN THE INTERIOR WORLD
In perpetuity, a basin of water, light, shuddering with its own
Extravagance, gone dull from keeping constant company with relentlessness.
By north, this was when thinking was dwindling and the economy was scarce.
By south, in heat, aluminum buckets of cholera fed to a colony of children
In the camps, those who don’t own shoes or roofs or relatives.
The less the light the more the discontent in dark.
Inside a mango candle burns all night.
An apparition bunched: the cholera slops in pails from bed to bed, sickling
On one child at a time.
If the water had been potable, so easily—
What more is it that you never would have wished for than this is?
Figs ripen from the inside out the way a living patient does and dies.
You deserve a better luck than this.
ATTITUDE OF LION
I.
One leaned his beautiful face against the wrought-iron cage and
Did not give in.
II.
When he was mythic, they combed the mane of him
In the shapes
Of spruce lutes from a middle century.
He is still an immortelle,
Yellow, numbed, and numinous.
III.
Home is the curdled theater where I’m safe.
IV.
He was the smallest in the litter, the mackerel tabby found
By me at the radiator’s silver foot, but he was dormant, cold.
Thus began the business about “the Hair,” etc., the suicides—
V.
Sejant, I was implacable at the hill’s crest not willing
To go down. The needle and its kind of mercy
> Then the tumbling from the furrowed height
VI.
Into the Dutch elm leaves, a racket of lace,
Then rolling on the wood cart with the cloud-blue wooden wheels, away.
Couchant, you could stand for a King.
VII.
Your kind, in the oldest British Empire, held up your claws
But you did not roar, not rampantly.
On which continent do your antelopes live still, somewhere grazing
Elegant on red-oat and acacia grass,
VIII.
Puffed up so as not to look so slender
Or too frail to the more salient hunters of your kind.
I am like you, eyes closed, head low, resting on forepaws as if
In sleep, as if asleep.
CONSIDERING THE POSSIBLE MUSIC OF YOUR HAIR
And all that night carries soundlessly, a satchel of eels.
Fever going down like anemones too full with sweat to float,
Cloak of many blankets wounding you to warmth. It was not,
We both agreed, the time for hospital, its open sea of urgent
Care. Close your eyes and try to sleep. Underwater the music
Of your hair is glossy even now, willowing in currents, away
From our island rancid with the spring.
Not much longer now.
Green length of one hour, all the blood rushing to the places it will
Not be needed anymore. Now no longer now.
Bramble of needles taken out, for good. So many women
Have run their fingers (as I have) through the glossing of
Your hair—a dormant harp made musical By hand.
FAME RABIES
You are in a sulk, the kinky-bitter
Of frisée smothered by acute
Rosemary, irrevocable sage.
You revile herbs, ambition, fawnery.
Why were you a recluse
Hiding hither, there
In the straw-filled cages
Of the puppy mills,
Waiting there for what.
In the story, your life was young,
Would last. In the east you made
No memories. In the west you never were.
In the middle of the country, once
In a large, aspiring, opaqued crowd,
You could barely wait to be visible.
In two thousand years, malaise
And foaming, hydrophobia—
The diagnosis is not possible
Before the Posthumous. Don’t pout.
What animal, do you think,
Would velvet be the pelt of?
LUCID INTERVAL
Outside the Opera House tonight, in Paris,
A man imagines things, makes wishes
Into voices that can sing.
How high the wind is now.
It could not be bitterer than this is.
I am being here, right now.
I lend to him my hair.
Far north of this country,
A castrato who lied about killing a swan—still able
To fly—was, himself ever after,
Unable to take flight or take to anything at all
That sings or glitters, intermittently.
THE ILLUMINATED KUNITZ
Of his early years, scarecrowish at the oval open of the woods,
Both arms outstretched, the cloud-owl began its perching on his clavicle, whoing
Inconstant through that night. This was in the time
Of flannel sleep, the briefer winterlife before this one.
Frost on the window in the shape of interrupted gulls.
White linens folded to be blued and ironed.
Stanley, druid, nobody’s daddy but your own—small child, nightgowned
In the backseat of the Buick perching toward the front, asking every
Fourteen miles—How long till we get home?—through Pennsylvania Dutch
Land, across the wold of sea, past Willan’s Farm where Blake
Had wandered as a boy looking for a chowder-mug of fresh white milk.
In the small illuminations of his work, he tamed the owl: it settled into him,
He said. The child was climbing up the lean celestial ladder,
Minute, particular to her own idea of moon. (She wants she wants she wants.)
WE HAVE ALWAYS LIVED IN THE CASTLE
It was always autumn in the paraphernalia of my laudanums.
There was someone in my autumns in a wheelchair whom my heart
Was aching for—inevitable as moss; the intensity of my sympathy
Was mostly out of fear of living in a chair like that myself.
Wouldn’t you feel likewise, if you couldn’t—poppet—walk?
When I was a minx, I always slept alone from him.
Now most everyone wants to ask me if I really sleep
And if I love. If they are gentlepersons they shut up.
Indelible, my joy.
At evening, syrinx of birdsong, obsessive as the woman in the druid-blue
Uniform of a civil servant writing and rewriting marginalia
To the memoir of the life she wished she’d lived.
Of my own venatic arts, everything I ever killed had never been alive.
Then there’s the incessant scrubbing of the sugarbowl for arsenic, and guile,
After any hope of fact, forensically.
I’m not bored yet.
And all the dark I did is done.
MEDIEVAL WARM TIME
Before the Iron Curtain, before the sadder
Century, the one I was born into as
A little Cosmonaut, creeping in bomb shelters
With Mr. White, the school custodian
Who shoveled the coal while I occupied the alcove
Of my ways, it was so warm inside.
That ice age was a little one, a few hundred years about
One thousand years ago. That was all before buttons
And their holes had been considered closure,
Before there was a left shoe from the right.
My mother’s hair was ginger-colored, somewhere where
It’s even colder than it will ever be again.
Everything I ever wished for—
A Dalmatian bounding spotted through the snow.
CAVE PAINTING OF A DUN HORSE
He is stretching on the wall, appears to be in motion.
He cannot turn his head, but you can glean his eye
By candlelight, a catastrophe of ochre hope.
I know little else having shook loose from my own mane
All that would be true if I said it to be so.
White canes humble through the night.
In the years, most of what I made I made up.
The etching of your dying is as cutting as it was
That many years ago, when I chose its acid touch for you.
There have been two wars.
I have read religiously, mostly texts which have red spines.
I had dreams that were inhumane to me.
The smaller the light to write to becomes, the more
I have to say to you.
MANDELSTAM
The night calves a meager bit of meat, measured in kilos, from the suddenly bright hay.
Your sadness is a thimble wrapped in a tiny tourniquet by the gauze
Once woven on an inch-loom during a proclamation of great love.
In the Saint Petersburg beneath Saint Petersburg, it is twilight all the time.
Robes so heavy with the heft of snow, such important jewels, no one can move
Without a retinue, a company. Bedouins or wolfhounds beneath stars.
At the sanatorium, your last letter written on a crag of paper asking for warm
Cloth (could it be made?) of cypress light. Even now, it is too cold to be alive.
Heart seized twice, and empathy would make the evening hollow, even by its swathed
And folding wing. Oblivion—a notice to y
our brother on a green brochure, in time
Arrived by hand to hand to hand.
NON-FICTION POEM
Tonight you wear a jacket lined with the shot silk
Of your early years, color of the silver-dull, Irish farthings
In relief of little lyres.
Is it true I will not be here to look after you. What will.
Who will comb your cowlick down?
Never-minding the girl of myself
I once ruined, wittingly, with magnolia boughs and willfulness.
For example:
My extravagance of gesture;
The maize field fallowed from simplicity; redundancy,
The green wind of reckoning.
Did you say I’ve said “Lark” for the last allotted time?
Have I ever—even once—been disingenuous, not told you
Of the truth and nothing but.
CARPE DEMON
Where is your father whose eye you were the apple of?
Where are your mother’s parlor portières, her slip-covered days, her petticoats?
In the orchard at the other end of time, you were just a child in ballet slippers,
Your first poodle skirt, your tortoiseshell barrettes. As the peach tree grew more
Scarce each day, you kept running out to try to tape the leaves back on their boughs.
Once, I caught you catch a pond of sunlight in your lap and when you stood,
The sunlight spilt; it could never follow you. Once, above the river,
You told me you were born to be a turtle, swimming down. Under the bridge
Now you take your meals where the thinnest creatures live at the end
Of the world. Carpe Demon, you told me just before you put down the phone
And drank the antifreeze. This year, the winter sky in Missouri is a kind of cold
The color of a turtle’s hood, a soup of dandelion, burdock root, and clay.
FOR A SNOW LEOPARD IN OCTOBER
Stay, little ounce, here in
Fleece and leaf with me, in the evermore
Where swans trembled in the lake around our bed of hay and morning
Came each morning like a felt cloak billowing
Across the most pale day. It was the color of a steeple disappearing
In an old Venetian sky. Or of a saint tamping the grenadine
Of his heavy robes before the Blessing of the Animals.
I’ve heard tell of men who brought Great Pyrenees, a borzoi, or
Some pocket mice, baskets of mourning doves beneath their wicker lids,
A chameleon on a leash from the Prussian circuses,
And from the farthest Caucasus, some tundra wolves in pairs.
In a meadow I had fallen
As deep in sleep as a trilobite in the red clay of the centuries.
Even now, just down our winding road, I can hear the children blanketing
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