to drift in heaps on the porches?
The Constellation Quilt
She stitched her story on black
silk patches from the mourning dress, quaint
as our novels will seem, but we still recognize
tonight's sky, as if there were a pattern
whose edges compose with distance, like nebulae
or namings, so triangles become Orion
Horse, Morning Star, not flanks and wings imagined
in gases, or story pieced out of intervals
from which any might grow, as if sparks ever
scatter the same, or a name assume one face
and stance, dated in cross-stitch in a corner
Stitching a name like defoliate in white thread
on white fabric leaves the leaf empty. In that
century, it was a giraffe or a bear's act. Sometimes
the only pattern seems shock waves advancing
in parallel fanned lines, leaving a tide's debris
whose pattern is moon, cryptic as if there were none
the one safe assumption. Littlest sisters eclipsed
are each another story of a marriage, using the same
scraps for different constellations, Bear, Swan
overlapping.
The Heat Bird
1
A critic objects to their “misterian” qualities
I look it up and don't find it, which must relate
to the mystères in religions. Stepping across stones in the river, which covers my sound, I startle a big bird who must circle the meadow to gain height. There is a din of big wings. A crow loops over and over me. I can see many feathers gone from its wing by sky filling in, but it's not the big bird I walk into the meadow to find what I've already called an eagle to myself. At first you just notice a heap like old asphalt and white stones dumped
2
There is a curving belly. The cow's head is away from me
Its corpse is too new to smell, but as an explanation
hasn't identified my bird. Twice I'm not sure if light wings
between some bushes are not light through crow feathers
but then I really see the expansive back swoop down
and circle up to another cottonwood and light
It's a buzzard with a little red head. You say
that's good. They're not so scarce anymore. It should
have been more afraid of me
3
Fresh wind blows the other way at dawn, so
I'm free to wonder at the kind of charge such a mass
of death might put on air, which is sometimes clear
with yellow finches and butterflies. That poor heap
is all sleeping meat by design with little affect
I decide in a supermarket, whose sole mystere is an evocative creak in a wheel. Not unlike a dead stinkbug on the path, but unlike a little snake I pass over All night I pictured its bones for a small box of mine Today I remembered, on my last night you wanted to linger after the concert, drinking with other couples like a delicate dragonfly
4
And I can't predict your trauma. Potent and careless
as radiation here, which we call careless, because
we don't suspect anything. Then future form is in doubt
Like a critic I thought form was an equilibrium
which progressed by momentum from some original reduction
of fear to the horizon. But my son's thigh bones
are too long. I seduced myself. I thought
I'll give it a little fish for the unexpected. Its paw
moved. My back-bones are sparking mica on sand
now, that carried messages up and down
5
Glass that melted in the last eruption of the
Valle Grande has cooled, and you can run
among wild iris on a slope, or fireweed in the fall
Its former violence is the landscape, as far as Oklahoma. Its ontogeny as a thin place scrambles the plane's radio, repeating the pre-radio dream At any time, they all tell us, to think of eruption as a tardy arrival into present form, the temperate crystal I still see brightness below as night anger, not because of violence, but its continuousness with the past while airy light on the plain is merciful and diffuse that glints on radium pools. I wanted to learn how to dance last year. I thought your daughter might teach me
6
She did a pretty good job at elucidating something
she didn't understand and had no interest in
out of duty. She has evoked a yen for dance. Any
beat with wind through it. In an apricot tree
were many large birds, and an eagle that takes off
as if tumbling before catching its lift. I thought
it was flight that rumpled the collar down like a broken neck
but then as it climbed, it resembled a man in eagle dress
whose feathers ruffle back because of firm feet
stamping the ground in wind. The other birds discreetly
passed their minutes with old drummers of stamina
but eagles entered swept ground oblivious to other drummers
making streams of rhythm in their repetitions
until pretty soon some of the other ladies' white feet
moved to them, too, bound thickly around the ankles
so their claws look especially small
7
