Come with me, she says.
Look around: green chokecherries will ripen to black.
Listen: the common yellow-throat’s uncommon song.
Yes, I see your dead doe in the ditch.
She is not lost.
She is grazing on tender grass in a place you cannot go.
Flowers bloom by the old brick house.
Look: a yellow cat among the asters.
Shades of mice scamper around her feet.
Wild apple trees will bear a sweet and gnarly fruit.
Can you hear the laughter of your farmer tending them
a hundred years ago?
Bluebells and daylilies, dead nettle
and roses spread around that abandoned foundation hole.
Your gardener is there, her hands deep in the soil.
Beehives where the tavern was
Otter washing her paws
in the cold pond water.
Bluebird, robin, forgotten
songs come home.
Vulture and hawk
soaring the slope.
Three thin deer,
feet splayed in dry grass.
Squirrels. Rabbits.
Stones.
Snowmelt, icy
from the hills.
Logging truck grunting
far down the road,
its work, its purpose,
its heavy load.
From her chair by the window,
Mother watches crows settle in the pines.
I can call them, she says.
I caw and they come.
Underneath the table,
her tiny dog snores his tiny snore.
I search through piles of papers on the desk
for notices and bills;
I make us cups of tea.
She scolds me for carrying
a stack of books she thinks too heavy.
I scold her because she bends
to pick a paperclip from the floor.
She won’t write captions
for the family photos,
her trip to Mexico after the War.
LESSON ONE
Parting the Wild Horse’s Mane
in this alley in the center of town,
embarrassed, in heavy shoes
I clunk and stomp among the stones.
The White Crane Spreads Out its Wing.
The teacher is elegant in blue silk and red slippers.
I am stupid in my rolled-up jeans.
I try to Brush away the thick distractions
around my Knee; my hands tangle,
feet stumble
until I settle down to Play the Lute.
LESSON TWO
Randomly flailing, adjusting my toes,
I Drive the Monkey a little bit Away,
chatter a little less.
Snow falls in enormous
flakes, each bigger
than the invisible moon.
In twenty-seven rectangles, four trees
climb a blue hill; beyond,
the mountains rise green.
Snow falls from blue
through gray, mirrored
once, once turned over.
It has been shown that the human
brain can get used
to anything: eyeglasses that reverse
or invert the world,
nearly any loss.
It has been proven that
we do not perceive the world
This sixteenth-century French cabinet
was a bequest. Originally to keep wine,
it now holds urns
of ashes awaiting internment.
And here we have our hermitess.
Her door is closed this morning
so she will not receive you.
Perhaps if you return—
No. She keeps no regular hours,
every audience is by chance.
I don’t know; no one knows precisely
how she spends those days alone. She has ink
and paper, needles and yarn, a small
black cat with white paws.
Sometimes she makes a little book,
or socks in brilliant colors that you might glimpse
Sometimes the hungry baby was left to cry.
The llama at the zoo spat,
someone stole the arrowheads.
A woman in a white dress played a harp by candlelight.
The teacher’s pet got the lead in the play.
Father pulled the sled through the lamplit park in the falling snow.
Later, he started to drink and Mother wouldn’t tell.
There were springs with fragrant crabapple bloom,
and summer crowns of daisy and vetch.
There was a Christmas when everyone had chicken pox.
There was the lover who, after long uphill walks,
after kisses in summer rain, left without saying goodbye.
There was a lover who stayed,
a sister who died,
a child who grew up and went away.
There were hands, eyes, the songs of many birds.
Water
drips
from canyon lips.
From dark trees
leaves
drift.
Spiders spin
between
the trees.
In one web
one leaf
is caught.
Drops shape
pools,
and canyon lips.
From canyon lips
Most of them don’t know
the size of things:
everything is bigger and smaller
than they suppose.
We watch them come and go
while they stay where they are.
The difference is all time
in a shape they cannot see.
If we live long among them
we grow small and tedious.
If they live long among us,
they grow transparent and slow.
I have become obsessed with underpinnings:
Olga no longer makes the Daisy in my size.
They assume small women
want padding–”contour” they call it.
But contours are hot, and they itch,
and besides, I told the clerk,
I am happy with my size.
And she, who guessed my numbers by looking–
she who for forty years had seen all sizes,
had fitted corsets and prostheses,
measured without a blink over sags and scars–
said Well, you ought to be, and searched
the bins along the wall to see if there might be
one more, and there wasn’t.
She found a substitution, adequate,
but not what I’d hoped for.
What will I see today
doing the Christmas baking
and walking on the icy road
with the dog and my friend
who is lonely for her children?
The sea eagle
has been seen in Massachusetts,
5000 miles from home.
What is he lonely for?
And what will he see?
Sprinkled sunshine doses of vigor
this morning as I walk the Green Lake path.
Day of the Dead makes altars of trees.
Pageant of birdsong. Insect nibbles a leaf.
Bird nibbles insect. Raptor snags a Beswick’s Wren.
The observant coxswain motions left toward a nest
now fallen in agua.
Deep green agua riffled by oars makes a “V”
like a gaggle of geese splitting the sky.
Each buoy a sugared skull bobbing gently, slowly melting
like an iceberg receding in silt.
Take my father off the altar,
put him in a shell and he would glide
to leave me better memory.
My dead mother never learned to drive.
Never learned to swim.