Family

Family

What is it that Lady Macbeth says

to her crown-ravenous husband, "screw

your courage to the sticking place" ? 

I know she's all on about drugging

the humble guards and slithering 

in to ruff up Duncan, yes, she even

makes that seem valiant, a done thing

after the witches puff their prophecy

over their bubbling pot.  It's like that

going back home, it's slipping a mickey

to the boys on my post, it’s letting

them hold the .410 of my defense

while I rue the stile. It’s trusting

they’ll hand it back to me

when the service is through.  It’s walking

to a grave in the cemetery, where only one

of her three children will be there and one

of those absent two lives just down

the street, five miles maybe as the raven 

nests.  Unarmed I’m just another fly finding

the only bare spot left on the meat.  So.

Let’s just say I hope it rains long enough

that the mortician, who I grew up with,

who knows the whole town’s intimacies,

stands to cough respectfully and queues

us to leave.  We’ll have driven nine hours

to stand on a small hill of grass

to watch the ashes slide in (and here I’m reminded

of how last summer we buried

my sister-in-law, how she was the stone

did you know they did that, made

her part of the granite or whatever

bedrock they hauled up from some Maine

quarry, pulverized and mixed

and firmed her up again to stand beside

her father, dead of lung cancer at 42,

and her brother-in-law, a suicide casualty

thirty years ago.  I’m reminded too how

the eulogy was crashed by a pompous

ass step-father swilling his insulin.  Shit. 

I’ve never met a family yet who didn’t

split in their differences but come

back again to respect the dead.  I’ll

tell you I know mine’s not an exception

but what love are we raised in when

a son (my father) can’t put down

his ax or a daughter (my aunt) can’t

put down her target?  Yeah, so

we’ll come and show our respects

and cry and hug the crowd who came

and then go home and know

as far as family goes, the power

isn’t in some prophecy, it’s in

the nerve it picks, as if that nerve

were a string on a cello or harp

and the bow we draw across

is slick with blood instead

of resin...right.  Draw it across.  Family. 

Oddments and Other Means to an End

Oddments and Other Means to an End

                                                                                 I                              

...They live the lives of monks,

one revelation healing the ravage of the other.

                                                                Robert Lowell

                                                                Mexico

There were others, of course there were others and even then

I had to go back and sift out the shards and bits

of bone I’d broken and let go of, what I’d promised

to be devotional to for the next of certain years the rest

of my life, to carry a vial that will survive my falling

down the mountain (contrary to popular thought, decent

is by far the hardest on everyone coming down: fatigue

missteps almost every footfall)

And now I can’t tell sometimes the difference between

the knee you must’ve kneeled on (I’ve only ever seen you do

it in dirt, thinning new carrots or turnip greens) and the knuckle

you’d swing out and true, my teeth rattling coming undone. 

Maybe I didn’t know I’d had enough and could turn off

the mountain road, maybe I didn’t know I could choose

                                                                                  II

You’re gone; I’m learning to live in history.

What is history?  What you cannot touch.

another guide to take me between the twist of rhodendron,

one who would wait for me or simply glow like the churned water

in the slow wake  (twelve knots?)  moving ship that from our

height we’d never see in the dark but we could see deep

beneath somehow and the krill or whatever it was come to

the top and drink and slip back down beneath it all,

free.  Yes, and so of that set of bones, your knee and knuckle,

listen how they rub (once I find them again, yours

in particular, I’ll be at once penitent and pugilent and I’ll keep 

them in the leather medicine bag I tie at my throat...

And every morning is the orchestra

of birds come to set up their sheet music and their stands:

and the clanking of brass and of wood and of all the keys

of the piano: a lone dove  and one rooster, a sensuous

                                                                                    III

devotion hikes uphill in iron shoes

boost from the cardinal and sweet of the bluebird and u-

sually one or two crow.  Since you died I’ve been coming back

down with those two bones I sifted your ash for.  I know

if you ever came back to demand them I’d give you a good

fight they don’t fit you anymore, they’ll make you clumsy,

they’ll weigh you down they’re fused to my clavicle

now like a third breast, calcifying.  Instead, I’ll send you after  

geese, and watch how, startled as if by headlights,

you make them rise, how they begin by flapping their heavy

wings, how they almost run to get off the water and how what can

falls back down on the pond and what can’t gives up with them

to be dropped casually as shit.  Look, it’s nothing new with you.

Has it ever been?  I don’t know where this can ever go, how

do any of us who let go know when giving up is beautiful,

when it's illuminating, when bones and an old bag of skin
are just not necessary for going up, coming down, or flying?

Keeper

Keeper

Bright sun of my bright day,

I thank God for being alive--

a way of writing I once thought heartless.

                                                               

                                                                Robert Lowell

                                                                Logan Airport, Boston

Even though it begs comparison, who among us will ask,

because the lens for all its power blurs the periphery

into a snow squall, into a milk-blue cataract.  Coming back

from my mother’s sick bed again the long wide corridor of chess-

board squares, its staunch pawns, a bishop sliding

quiet and extreme into a crowded room (who hasn’t crept

up to the crack in the door in their mind and stood eves-

dropping on the dying and, hyper whiskers tensile, the dark

skits at the first proverbial twig?)  Walking away got easier

every time but slower too, you know?  Molasses slow and just

as heavy, just as dark and as soundless--we’re all a bunch

of zombies I thought but it took me twenty squares to say it--

like the blast trauma dead who die without a mark on them,

or the boy in the lake, one of the twelve drowned that summer,

who died of acute dilation of the heart--I think: the flawless

faces, what peace and quiet their faces make (when I was a kid and she’d

scream I just want some peace and quiet I thought she meant

piece and I wanted to find it for her desperately sifting through

the broken window glass and dolls heads, their matted skulls,

the holes where a single lock of hair and glue pulled through

and looking into it was patches  made elusive, made escape, made

a grotesque want to hide it with her stained underpants and rest

of that glass (don’t ask) and I wonder how would, if she died after the beating,

the mortician cover the stitched lip, the swollen closed eye, 

the neck bruising?  What kind of foundation or blush?  Is

their palate any different than a teenagers)  What mascara?

I’m coming on the corner and forget where I need

to turn right or left or straight through and a woman

crouches down by the door and her palms and face are great

friends and she’s heaving and hauling and I’m heaving

and hauling so I sit next to her on the black square and hold

her.  I don’t know who she is.  I remember a story about a light-

house keeper who went out into the blizzard with his fire

and the wind kept snuffing it out until finally he put it

in his mouth and bent to it all and pushed, finally, out the door.

He counted each stair, burning more and more.  There were 43.

Round and round the tower to light the light. Arriving

and breathing on the wick isn’t he, I have to ask, in as much

pain as the captain being battered on the rocks, or about to be

before the light shines out, before he can (he still

has time) change course?  Seeing that keeper climb those stairs

is seeing myself walking down that hall to my broken

and bloody mother.  Walking back is that fire in my mouth.

Yes, she is hurting.  She is going to die of it eventually. 

But she is sedated.  She’s played her last piece.  I’m holding

this woman who I don’t know.  And this is our only anesthesia.

And the comparison, in case you missed it, is whose pain

is worse?  The injured?  Or the one lifting their lips to the medicine?

Another Mother's Day

Another Mother’s Day

We know only a cool moon, how she slides

(or lets the clouds, truth) come up

behind us

at the dinner table how we don’t know

(although it’s been happening

above us, yes, 

all our lives)

she’s there rising and falling like whales's
breath.  It's like the way

I’d watch your fork

come up like a pump handle and all the food

fall off;

and like the dry edges of the spigot

it filled your cheeks

with nothing

but old air--air dredged up, a silty belch

to settle the unseen but still, but still

smelt, until the rough up and down

comes to glide (primed

now) on memory

and water  (up to your lips at your sick

bed) and it’s a while before

I realize water

isn’t what pulls you away too soon for good forever,

it’s day

or night above and below going over and over

and over

like a clerk searching  on blank square

or one small wrong number someone let slip

their ruler and had you down for only 60

but it should have been

longer, right?  I don’t want

to lock you in some dumb-tongued theology

on the fifth lip of Mount Purgatory

though we’re both

on the cliff together aren’t we,

doing what we did to one another, fumbling

in the black smoke

groping too close to the edge.  (but this is

purgatory and only vertigo stops our heart)
I want you

there because I want

to think there’s redemption

for falling off

of life

that while I’m alive I have a chance still

to chose to be

kind

and my indulgence is my action

and it will lift you too,

it will,

like a great moon,

and it will illuminate you, and you will penetrate

the smoke and I will see you, we all
will see you and run to you and embrace
you and you will see us and let us

When Abused Children Play

When Abused Children Play

It’s not human sacrifice and sadistic

torture that is being celebrated, rather

it’s Christ climbing to his feet after

the cruelest of all electric shock treatments.

                                                                Robert Lowell

                                                                In a letter to William Empson

On the other side of the fence

is the saddest patch of grass--

can you see it, worn to mud

or dust in the middle, like the seat

of a boy’s pants, one who fidgets,

who is never still and can’t be, or the mind’s

high voltage with the same bull’s-

eye ground lit and lit and lit

and then swallowed though

each time it’s slower and slower

the throat swollen like an end stage

sufferer of scurvy.    See how rain,

never now a relief, beats

on the cracked patch (cracks can

deceive, remember?) and the debris:

the flat-tired bicycles, one

with a training wheel stuck up

in the air above the pedal of the other

twined like two young stags fighting.

Beside it all, a thrown-up-quick plywood

marker boundary line (it blew down

once in one of the winter’s

milder winds) rotting from the bottom

up.  From here I see  all the knots,

all kinds of faces and ghouls that don’t

look at all unlike two pieces

of art I saw yesterday, paper beside

paper, the drawing and casting

of bones.  How is it we find enlightenment,

how is it we depend on the protections

of skulls, how is it we keep saints,

Jerome mostly, in the room with us

quilled in this technique, curled into

roses or dinner plate size hyacinths and all

on black ungloss, what does it do

to us, the depth of that shadow

and how, to bring it back

to the now child-

less patch of grass: how, maybe can it all

breathe again, in an absolute

sigh of relief to be free of those angry

thumping, locked in feet?  A mother

screaming a three year old screaming a boy

four or five riding down

the slope of the hill over and over

and over and over past the now dis-

embled plastic swing set, his worn path a line

to the woods where maybe he peeks

sometimes in the drizzle, (mother even

pushes them out in the rain saying

Jesus Christ get the fuck out

of my face)  (that was the first

thing I heard her say after they moved in.)

Today their gonness is almost palatable.

They put all they could in the U-Haul of their life

and drove off with it, leaving three

bikes, piles of dog crap, and a bald patch, a breathless

pause the heart sometimes makes

between beats

when the muscle is tired

worn almost through the skin, electric

sizzle burned ends revival still

miles and miles away or caught in traffic

at another more pressing accident where the EMT offers

oxygen, a soft toy, a grim jaw

lifting them all from the burning wreck.But that's
another family and another story.

Owning Your Old Knives

On Owning Your Old Knives

Sufferer, how can you help me,

if I use your sickness

to increase my own?

Will we always be

one up, the other down,

one hitting bottom, the other

flying through the trees--

seesaw inseperables?

                                                Robert Lowell

                                                Seesaw

After you died I don’t know why but my father

put some of your wood-handled knives

in a paper bag and gave them to me when I came home.

Of course some had cut clean

through how couldn’t they and I laid them

to rest on the floor of the back seat

on the passengers side so if for some reason

I was stopped and rammed full speed

from behind the last thing I’d’ve wanted was to be

stabbed in the back by them.  I didn’t need

that scar too.  They were dull anyway

and some of the handles were coming loose most

were unbalanced and not at all designed for real

tomatoes or real bread.  Still, when I got home

it seemed my duty to sharpen them for you

even though you didn’t need them not where you went

or were going and of course  you couldn’t hold

the one favorite of yours (I could tell it lived a different

life than the rest through its pock and singe

pimple-burns in its wooden skin and the right side

only as though it slept or not slept but rested

on its left as though having that blade out (you were

right handed)you’d be ready but I don’t know what for

or was it you really did remember

being attacked or something in you did

and you felt more steady in yourself after

those weeks in the hospital in the nursing

home healing you drying you

out a temporary cure for the fug in your brain

that was lifting when you were alone at home

in your own chair and we’d all gone back

to our own children and our own lives.  While the outside

bruises were gone and the spleen too (where

and because you said you didn’t remember nothing else

could be done other than to take it out) they kicked you

over and over and over the way I’ve watched

cane cutters take hold of the thick stalk

and wack one two its down one two its down

and sometimes when nobody’s looking and because

the old wives say its so they lick their blade

for the sweet iron and close their eyes feeling

the strength return on their tongue

first their thumb the blade-end guard protecting

the lips from everything from It all. 

These blades

and that one in particular with the little singes

were yours until you stopped needing them.   They laid

in the drawer for three or four years.  Of course

they slid as easily into their paper sheath  as they did

into any belly you pretended was a perpetrator:

a tomato puckering under the weight until you adjusted

where you gripped your fist on the wood

a carrot root losing its head easy enough to heat you

with false confidence.  They were dull as August

mornings never rising above the fog as crumpled paper

lunch bags a peculiar food.  None of this stops me

from sharpening them every one and hide them

in the basement on the top of an old medicine

cabinet and I pass by them every day like I always did

when you held them when I was young and cut me

cane that I was a whole plantation one stalk

at a time.

House Fire

House Fire

I will leave earth

with my shoes tied

as if the walk

could cut bare feet.

                                Robert Lowell

                                This Golden Summer

                          

Really, in the end, there’s no one

to blame, although it can be

traced back to one misstep

a turn so small its almost

overlooked.  That random live

ash, you know?  And the conditions:

everything inside is a woodbox

with the lid nearly able to close

it’s snowing outside so he filled it

early, and the stray pine bark

on the rug seems enough in

itself laying around waiting, right?

and how it comes to this, how it all

comes to the image of dominoes

how we set them up day after day

and if we’re lucky

maybe the first couple of tracks

have dust (careful--but lift one--see)

the bald table beneath, like a rug

that under the table leg is the color

you bought it twenty years ago

and you know every time, every time!

you vacuum it fades more and more

but you don’t want to notice.  One day they,

our kids, step out full grown if we’re

lucky, if that random live ash

fell in the water instead of that bulging

woodbox and that random draft

under the door, all these little

forgettings:  the flue, the creosote,

the windwitch under the door, the sway

once, once! past it all, just the once

the drape she’d meant to shorten but

never got to it.  Oh!  Looking at it

after its all over and all we can say,

all we should say is OH!  The throat

can’t console, no noise no...what good

you tell me does it do to line up the should-

haves like those dominoes and now

it’s the only game we play?  Tell me--tell me

we walk through life unscathed.  Really?  Our feet

caked with mud and we track it, gratefully,

into the house of our living breathing

asleep kids, and the fire’s safe behind the grate

and it’s banked and soothing.  Ain’t we

the lucky ones for fuck’s sake, we’re not

picking them out of the wet black

with a hoe, shit yes, say OH.  Say that

and don’t say anything else.  

Repetitive Repetitive

Repetitive  Repetitive         

The barberry berry sticks on the small hedge,

cold slits the same crease in the finger,

the same thorn hurts.  The leaf repeats the lesson.

                                                               

                                                                                “The Lesson”

                                                                                Robert Lowell

for Gail 

                                               

I’m worried we’re at the beginning

of another failed crop.  Today, the 9^th

of May, we hover just above the freezing

mark, and yesterday someone said

snow, SNOW! up the road about ten miles.

Tulips of course have spread their petals

and rain’s their reliable concubine.  But

what of bees?  What when the palm

of the sun rests only long enough on their winter 

house to make suggestions, to raise an eyebrow?

Though I haven’t yet walked through I bet

the peach groves are as tight as a snare

having learned last year maybe, after

a wretched winter, their expression

of lust, the maniacal frost, come on bent

and creeping knees and these pinks

and greens have no way of knowing or

too of fighting back.  They just do

what they do in shock and shame

and fall helplessly like a girl’s wedding

dress, a girl who hadn’t been told, a

sheltered girl a naïve girl a praying

obedient girl, so it’s no wonder in the new

season there’s a paler green and a weaker

bloom.  If I were a bee...but I’m not. 

If I were the palm of the sun...but I’m not.

If I...still--spring is the great gamble, right?

The clutch of winter let go, spring those two

tight clutched casino dice at each table weighted

in someone’s favor; a shame but it’s true

right? and we almost always walk up to

the game and make a wager (even

hanging back we cast our lots) and we

wait while it all hangs in the air.  Remember

Siddhartha, what he’d become in the world

of the merchants?  We do: we wait and

maybe the shy bee and almost closed blossom

meet cautious as dogs and then, it’s going

to hurt but still, but still, we need each other.   

Another Easter Monday

Another Easter Monday: After Looking for Bishop in Worcester

The sun set in the sea; the same odd sun

rose from the sea,

and there was one of it and one of me

                                                           Crusoe in England                                                           

                                                                                Elizabeth Bishop

Frist day back and all I can say is

will you look at that

ladybug tug the dust she’s picked up

in some corner of the desk!

She’s (or he but how

do you tell) struggling up the deck

of post it notes and that

tangle of fur, chuffed up rug, some

cotton lopped off my Walt

Whitman t-shirt I don’t know what

all else.  But I’ve been

gone, I’ve lost what I’m expected

to look for, all these days

away (in a dark I can’t name

or explain) and all I can say is hey!

stay! let me take you under my glass

and look on you some, let me watch

you shake away that flake

of someone else’s skin. 

Yesterday I walked in

the hot Easter sun and watched

the trunks of trees, watched their empty

canopies (it’s spring, but just) rise

up the thunder storm sky because I’d wanted

(we wanted, my husband, compass

he is, found) to put my rock on your head-

stone, wanted some of something

near to Nova Scotia to top you off.  Moss

and cobwebs have grown, have laid down

on the crown of you.  You were not easy

to find. finding Lowell on Saturday

was a walk in the woods.  Finding you...

I just read your "Crusoe
in England"

and maybe his day back, his first day

after all those years gone in volcanoes,

in guano, in the bleats of goats, made him

knock his face against something too,

against something comforting to be

able to say I brought you away

I prayed to you, God you were to me,

a sharp and oily

blade I made my promise true

to you and now, now, if mockery

were a stone---if I could hold you alone

over that lone volcano---

and remember how we forged something

there?  would you show me now

to you?

When you finally died in Boston in 1979

you’d already died a thousand and one more

times.  You’d made it

art, you’d made it have legs, you’d made it

strip naked so you could slap it

on the face.  It laid dead on the bottom

of the cage, like your favorite bird.

Whatever, finally.  Did you want to

stay (because now you’re there

forever) with a father and mother who

never knew you, whom you never knew?

On a property bordering boarded up

factories?  Wafted smog?  Did you? Even
though you asked?

At the End of It All

At the End of It All

How helpless….is the line of fidelity…

like a cry in the night a river in the desert

conceived in the sand and perishing in the sand...

down inside where memory and blood

flow in mineshafts well chambers

full of dark names.

                                    Fortune Telling

                                    Zbigniew Herbert

Maybe by the time I get back I can't be recognized

maybe so much of the tide will have arrived and gone to sky,

churned and bummed off by a salt cloud that goes and rolls so fast

it’s a bullet from a .45 or its sweat in the gun metal

or it’s breath in the powder under the cap it’s sitting

there a Buddha’s thought on a shelf suspended

with enemies and friends around its belly I am not the one you used

to know we both will say simultaneously we’ll press

the fidelity line with the delicate tip of memory, revive

each other the way God must’ve revived Adam after

that brief sleep of eternity so he could open and close

the cage he kept all to himself in the bone departing whole

grown into a woman just like that just like all the pasts

coming home and waiting behind the drapes sometimes

patient sometimes jumping the gun only to be pushed

back onto the bed and thrust and smelted into a shape

that is at once a blade and at once mirror

In Another Tongue: the Nicene Creed:

In Another Tongue: the Nicene Creed:

Among the Living and the Dead

We are things thrown in the air

alive in flight...

our rust the color of the chameleon.

                                                                Our Afterlife I

                                                                Robert Lowell

Our loyalty to one another sticks like love...

                                                                Our Afterlife II

                                                                Robert Lowell

soft as all things soft the blossoms fall

off the maple.  they make the new green

grass seem lit with pricks of light.  tips

of gold, we all walk through them on our way

into other obligations.  the car door opens

and closes and for a moment, an hour or so,

it’s river river river wider than her shoulders

can carry where a week ago or a few days

more it was strips of ice briefly seeming like

meat strips drying on the banks of a hunt camp. 

i half expected a woman standing over it all

with her swan’s wing waving over and over

like a blessing (but really it was swaying

birches), the way a horse’s tail would in summer

to send the flies to another sky.  it seems

we never really leave places like these

where our dead come to be eaten by us

in some other way, or maybe not eaten but parceled

out, stripped and sun-dried, needing

vigilance, ours, protection from the flies.

like the eye that sees through the eye

of a camera lens, that steady elbow, that held

breath, how close it really is to the hunter,

how the sites line up just under the shoulder,

between the heavy bags of breath the pugilist

chooses to swing between aiming straight

and true to the heart.  taken down that way,

all the light shuffled in then shuttered out, 

and paused forever, I can’t not think a body is almost

like this, caught off guard while some gold

fleck distracts it and pulls its mouth to the grass:

to lay bare the teeth the tongue the open throat

of it all that is patient as that again again again jaw.  or

when the hospital released my mother and I

wasn’t there to stop them, she walked out on her

own (months before she really died for good this time)

and fell down the basement stairs.  it was winter

then and she lay by the woodstove in the low

blossom ash becomes, slow, slow, a tired old

heart.  later, when she picked herself up, the strip

of blood down her inner thigh, dried and flaky,

gave her the only memory of it: looking back

up the stairs a claw hammer handle sticking

out (cellar stairs, they have no risers) and how

she survived that (she’d gone down looking

for the cat) she’d say she spoke to someone standing

on the last step. they were standing there.  they

were.  she insisted.  we know it’s pills, but for

her, knowing who it was made all the difference

in that fall.  she didn’t name them.  she was,

she’d say later, angry at being left behind by

them, kept alive by us.  I don’t know.  I listened to her

suicides all my life.  they fell sometimes like

flies on warm meat, patiently laying eggs.  the 

veins, coagulated, stripped away, mostly, 

with the hide, could give no more blood.  and 

sometimes they were trees coughing up courage 

after a long long winter giving in again, wooed

to and by all that warming dirt, all the roots can

provide.  Alive, sometimes resenting it, but still, alive.

This Bird Down East Voodoo

This Bird

There’s a rooster here in town and he greets

the foggy morning with cold feet.  I can see

him plucking up the mud of his pen, a delicate

step into the end of April this, as Eliot says, cruel,

cruel month.   I wonder (because I can’t see him, only

hear, wonder) if his hens get tired of his puff

and swag, if they ignore him and get with

their day of taking the rain in strides of regularity:

they wake, they maybe lay an egg, they fake

and weave the way a pugilist may between

the shadows of her own feet, or, before the ropes

strip their back of flesh before they go down

on the matt (a stoop of old rail here to perch)

late, to shake out seed to make the egg pucker the air

and kick out when mister gets close enough

to have his way with spur and leg and under-

feather.  He’s  never considered, has he, when some-

one comes to take, all the children, his, that pass

through the gate, snug up in the warm

bucket, and those feet (mine when I was a child)

sideswiping the still possible, even at the end

of Aril, patch of ice, and if he does he, wish-like,

flings out some voodoo eye to the knee to buckle

and the bucket’s thrown and in the shell

all! see! rising up brief as brief a flight they’ll  ever

get without a feather or a wing among them

the half dozen they are, maybe a couple more,

rising up and the gatherer the first to fall.  Small

justice is supposed to be an atonement,

an attrition, and the noble take it on their shoulders,

and these never would be kids (shhh, he’s all

strut and dung crusted cloaca) cracked free

for the crows or the stray cat or dog.  Still, he

goes on, calling all the shots: or tipping back

his head to spell it all out in the fog how the day’s

going to be, where we’ll stub our feet, where we’ll,

by some miracle, find our way, barely, just,

clear of the coop, free.

A Warning to the Vulnerable at the Interment

A Warning to the Vulnerable at the Interment

lines revised while listening 

to Spiegle I’m Spiegle

All the faithful who come

and too the heathens among

us when the song, undone

from the tongue, is (as

with all the sorrow-

ful) hung from the honey

yellow spring, when it has  

become in this little rhombus

of earth a will to suffer without

the troubled in-be

tweens meeting: neither heathen n-

or believer (because to be

a heathen belief is a pre-

requisite) they spread

their feet in both east

and west and to break

free (I want to, you?) don't

they, aside from being

troubled, which has

its own seduction, trample

to death a mother

instinct to soothe, wounds

only to be, stepping too close,

gulped up as me- like bones

left out in the open so

vultures, not crows (I like,

I admire crows, they’re thought-

ful intelligent birds) can

come with their own 

economy, their own ceremony

So don’t please step close

to the edge of the fake

green grass discreting the little

hole, don’t especially stand close

to the excavator skeleton cold

in her Lady Macbeth’s cloak,

smelling strange as coagulated

soap.  If you take to the faithful

rail while the ship embarks

just long enough to clear

the harbor, the graveyard’s

carrion bird, hunched, will wait,

ignore you, at least in this.  Re-

kindle your faith.