It’s Eerie
how the mountain falls away
while stepping closer.
It’s like love talking to itself
about abandoning her lovers
on a receding riverbank.
But when we try to reach the water,
we only step back through the forest,
its brown and littered path past
the champagne cabin
with its long well-warmed sheets.
Again, I hear that stream humming up
against those dark, cool hours called wedding night.
The river folds farther and farther away,
though its descent
is soft as an old kitchen cloth.
There is plenty of having to say I’m sorry
that never gets said, despite
a rumpled letter, or two
quavering late night calls.
Then decades of nothing at all.
Down south, a man with a bad back
is an accomplished painter and father.
And while I slipped out
a series of apologies over the years
I have not been nodded to or forgiven,
wasn’t let off into the freedom of nevermind.
For all I know the wedding-night cabin
still stands, winterized
and with an above-ground pool. For all I know
those sheets are floor rags now
and the curtains with their rosy green apples
recycled at the Salvation Army
and there’s a lake for kayaking with its own
receding shoreline toughening itself, enduring,
turning its lined face directly towards drought.
* * * * *
My Fatalities
Remember the story of the cow
who jumped over the moon
and returned with a star stuck to her horn?
She couldn’t stop dancing, couldn’t
slow herself — she and all her friends
fell exhausted until fiction saved them.
*
Grey bird on a grey road. I thought the bird would fly.
By now, crows have eaten it down.
And the bug on her back in my sink,
was she dead before the water came?
In August, small flies twirl along the kitchen floor.
*
The tiny Angora kid was bleating, bleating —
unable to nurse. I held her hard,
very hard until her own breath ended.
How do I send it back?
*
Poor Elsa the lurching, wing-broken black swan.
Something twisted
as I leaned to lift her out of the garden pond.
The lame, one-eyed chick, or Smokey
my rescued fledgling jay who broke his neck
in the rabbit cage
because he heard music in the far trees which he tried to reach.
*
Unsung insects and mice, roaches
in Baltimore, and what if someone died
and it could be traced to me, drunkenly
lifting a pint of mild at The Sloop, St. Ives?
*
But there is no whole story.
How many dogs have I decided for?
What about that downed, tattered doe
the boy from Australia taught me how to shoot ?
*
I live under a dark lid, was sent to school
with a new coat each winter,
never had to hunt my own food.
But I’m not ready to fly into the woods where the singing is,
not ready to be struck
by an intentional star. May the damages forgive me …