Over yonder, Michael,
the young man Michael,
tilled the land and ate
the snake’s heart,
so I have been told;
that is how one becomes
a casket,
amongst the fall of dappled
dawn and autumn leaves.
It bled and bled, who knew
snakes had such blood, so much dark
blood to give to the land
where Wallace built your father’s cabin.
It smells of angells inside,
like your brother’s years, like
the heart within you, Grandmother,
still threshing.
A field, plagued by the heats of June.
Sweat loped down your brother’s
salmon shirt, while he waved his bare arms
over the grasslands, pointing
even to the woods beyond the sky,
those great sweltering forests that grew
for his name.
The echoes, the slant of yellow
hill. I can see it all
on Creation, feathered grasses
eating up the earth; at the peal
of a yawning whisper
the vines melded
to the sinews of the fence,
heavy, laden
with shadows of grapes.
There used to be horses
here plowing each harvest season.
Now you can hear their descendants,
the blonde mare, screaming
down the road, wrenching
my cigarette smoke
from between slender trees;
dying in the afternoon.
A path weaves itself
and there are stone brick
walls hanging about; buttered flies
hop up from bundles of weeds.
There used to be children
here, playing house, playing
owners of pastures and lounging
country homes; you,
and your brother
who now drinks occasionally
on the terrace among
the failing roses.
Now, insects maraud the day.
They crawl my body, as I am,
swallowed by rich mounds.
Where have the birdbaths gone?
The ones you dawdled in, itching
at your shoulder blades
to bring the wings out. They
are gone, darling. You know that now.
Darling, darling,
they never were.
It reminds me so much of
what I felt in the deep
of birth. This memory
of wind and dimmed sun,
of pouting clouds
and the air quiet,
absent of mouths;
only the beetles gnawing
at wood and sound.
The red maple, the pine;
thin pillars of log.
The view of the white house,
painted blue with shutters
high upon the ridge; a pale sky
grows out from
its fleshy roof.
Yet, I can’t help
the flickering vision;
seeing it all burning
in September
blooming deep vermillion
haze. Why is that?
Is it the raw grope of age? Is it
knowledge of the cities,
those clean
skyscrapers to the south, or the suburbs
to the west,
new and nylon dressed.
Is it the smell of books
decaying in the study?
Or the falling
asleep in my shoes
in aroma of oaky bed?
Grandmother, I was dragged to slumber
as the day still held and dreamt
I was your nurse; dreamt
a four-poster earth
in which
I was your nurse in thirties cotton,
while at the same time
my summer body continued in the sheets.
I wrapped me up
and buried in the pillows
my closed head.
I, the I that was bedclothes,
grew tendrils of cloth for fists
and sank into the unknowing
of objects; a strange man slipped
into the pool outside as I swam
in the cyan wallpaper, in
and out of animation, speckled
with white riders.
This old knowledge
in me; have I swallowed
a second heart; set
it beating in the strangeness
of my head?
Was it yours?
I awoke so peculiar
and thought
I saw the child you
out the picture window,
hiding in the grasses
from your father on the bluff,
who clenched his pipe all through
the dusk and his own
baleful calls.
It must have been the ghost
of you, yet, you haven’t died.
No, no, it was tools cruely
bent, set in odd
arrangement in the knolls,
skirted in navy,
white wristed.
But parts of us are always dying,
Grandmother, even
in yellow winds. Because
the seasons come up and dry the leaves
and grasses and bring new rain.
The seeds of us,
our brown atoms, swagger
even as the film discolors into
bleaker shades, and our minds
writhe and crash;
even while our hands grow spots
in the shapes of continents
we once spanned.
Or so mumbles
the train back from Peakskill,
and is the lament
of the conductor’s eyes, lashing
in grey evening
as he punches my ticket through.
