Into Silence
(“May we have a little respite, or else may we be allowed to begin all over again.”) Colette, The Pure and the Impure
A quiet end, surrounded by her books
a bowl of stone fruit, the invisible last cat.
Night’s ease, the folding of some well-wisher’s blooms
branches outside the window: her lost mother’s whisk
sweeping a patch of ground with tentative flicks.
Rain had left deep puddles around her raft;
streetlight sank into them, briefly oiled, was subsumed
under the eyelids. This was the thing
for which no metaphor, the dark mare or dead end sufficed
but it held no interest for her anyway
who loved only quickening, onion shoots breaking soil
generations of barn kittens suckling milk
the messy gist of a broken egg, even a burst of fire
acrid leaves re-papering sky from orange to char.
The commotion of becoming, flesh or dawn
integuments of that necessary artifice
around a slow ripening: if one loves death too well
then what a waste, a pallid tongue stripped of buds.
We Let the Rain Come
What choice but to stretch out arms
or furl, a sensitive plant
sorry for itself. The meticulous sky
tracking the weather report
lets down an acidulous milk.
Salix caprea Pendula tree
is our umbrella, weeping wussy
with moony tears. It’s a weary day.
The six-foot mound swells
beneath the rain while starlings call.
Oh, you believed in a vegetal sympathy
at once bashful and cloying
with three views of the mountain split
a triptych glazed, inscrutable
birthing these tiny white stones
even as we tumbled achingly.
Extraordinary, the placid string of blanks
into which we insert her given name
with its pegged consonants, tapering vowels.
Within, there’s space for tendrilled grief;
below, the veiny earth full colonized.
My brother, here is no place for us
so let’s account ourselves fortunate
to trudge back through the plots
unknowing where we will lie.
The Psychiatrist at the Home
He considers us too exigent, my brother and I.
Childless residents, their walls stuccoed with photographs
stare at birds on the patio. They do without a translator.
In summer, the glass grows hot. Indoor plumage wilts
and trays are left untouched. The psychiatrist has a horse
he will saddle after rounds. I’m meant to watch him gallop off.
Present and future tense must serve.
How much longer will I be able to ride, he says.
We are all dying, your parents too. (A little fodder for the head.)
And something else—the lowest level’s always for the last.
It has its own peculiar court where pink-veined mallows open wide
apian humming risen from the compact holly shrub.
One voice recurs to the animal. I won’t say, to some lower order
but a tortuous note arrests me, finds out every twist in the guts
while the pain-scape is so endless as to seem holy.
One of these days, I’ll become all the time that’s past
as when my fingers grasp the gravedigger’s and all appetite’s gone.
When a beachfront building crumbles, wind rippling soft flanks.
