I read that right?—of exposed edges.
Bleeding, stop. Wound, begin to close—
Promise and threat go on because one
has to prophesy
to make any sense of tragedy.
I take the point: beware. Clots can, keep doing,
and infection knows the best place.
In a street, in the dark, under gaslights at 2 a.m.—
Those 19th-century engravings, low voices.
I Saw a House, a Field
Most of the rooms muted by cold,
and the furniture there
with its human chill under vast drapes
of plastic for the season—
Because eventually we are
an austerity, walking room to room
enamored and saddened, all the crazy variations
of bed and table, clocks,
books on a shelf, foreign harbors etched
some yesterday, framed for a wall.
And the effrontery of windows assuming
how lovely out, a certainty
of lawn and woods, distance on a road, voices
that in summer drift up and move away.
Desire. That continues
and continuing is the part loved
just as there is emptiness with an occasion in it,
clothes to remove before you ease into a bath.
Branches and branches scraping is
winter. And after midnight, near morning when
I stepped out, the moon by half,
was it deer I saw? A little one and maybe
its mother. Or they were
smaller than deer. Or larger.
Oh but they were strange, stopped
across the snow like that.
The No-Name Tapestries
When I think of the dead, it means
they’re thinking
of me, I delude myself happily, on occasion,
assuming the past
a thing to cherish like a face
surprised I bothered to come at all, given
the rain and the long drive.
But you were always let’s go anyway.
The commonest phrase: alive and well.
As if we jumped out of a hole
to stand here radiant.
In the no-name old tapestries, many
with halos, a glow or
a circle of jagged lines around each head
never bowed at the table, simply
looking straight on, like a mirror gives us
back to ourselves.
If sometimes the women
in those lush hangings so plainly dressed,
their rims woven
deep and lit, turn sideways, the hills,
a blue distance involved—
Out there. The one vanished, or just now
walking away—
In Dürer’s Engraving
Adam gets three for his privates—a triplet affair
as in poison ivy, as in the venerable
box elder. Eve, one wide leaf,
or it could be a smashed, very sorry rose. I need
better glasses. Engravings
take time. Still Adam looks at her—
curious or just wary, was love
invented yet?—and she, only at the snake wrapped
sensibly for balance around a young tree.
An apple. Sure, the apple:
okay tempting enough, even as E and A stand there
fully bodied and souled, not terribly young, years
to build up such muscle (Adam), such flesh (Eve) though
I can’t say they’re long in the tooth. Nary a tooth
to scare that garden. The rumor: no weapons, no way.
Those creatures in the foreground or behind
oblivious, or bored with the notion prey in whatever
shaft of light for naps: a mouse, a cat,
an ox, etcetera, each different-dreaming day or night if any
beyond the likes of us really do dream. Curly hair (Eve
with her lots more), side by side, roughly same
height, breadth, the standard
wedding pose—minus outfits—except
between them the snake so soon to be famous
I almost forget Eve’s set there to
take her bite. Hunger’s urgent echoing no end-to-it,
but whose, and for what…
Because
