style="font-size:15px;"> Apparently it had not heard
that it’s unkind, cruel to attack
a woman dressed in blackest black,
as widows do; she was my mother too.
“See,” she said to me (it’s all she said),
her black kid glove split and red.
I saw the hole, the drop of blood,
the hissing beak, the mark of teeth,
the finger’s flesh, the amniotic flood.
Afloat, afloat, atilt the boat,
the whole pond swayed—
breath suspends and death descends
and madness comes
to flower beds so bright and trim,
to the State of Massachusetts seal,
the State House Dome, its thinly crusted sun.
In that dream I dream again,
my mother lifts her veil
to kiss me, a patterned lace I memorized—
her fading face and fragile eyes—
fine and dark and real.
Shucks
in memoriam, Alice Brice
In a bar in Boston, somewhere near the aquarium,
gentlemen in white coats shucked oysters. We sipped
cold brine, a taste not of heaven but of earth,
and the oyster, loosened, slipped from the clean inside
of the shell, no human hand or finger ever touching,
just the lip, then the tongue, then the teeth in that soft flesh,
the one chewy button of muscle. Alice ordered
Campari “with lots of lime.” “One for me too,” I said.
Among memories of reading Keats on the lawns
of the Yard that summer, I keep this one. The bitter red drink
she called for years later in Santa Fe. Just a weekend.
After persuading me to buy a red cape from a woman
in the market, we settled into a late lunch at the Pink Adobe,
sipping, shucking our stories. The last time I saw her.
Red Oaks
I wake to trees in a window
or rather four windows
like a Japanese screen,
each panel a version
of a New Hampshire wood.
It’s winter white under the trees,
a ground like crumpled silk
or parchment flecked
with fibers of rag—
the litter of stump and stone.
And though morning is not brilliant
and there is no sound and nothing
is moving, I know
under the mounds of soft snow
are rivulets of melt refrozen,
layers of hard black leaves,
white roots growing
quietly, quietly.
A few stiff leaves cling,
the color of grocery-bag paper.
The subject is trees—
tall-slender or scrub-bent,
brown-gray against
white sky. A heavy stroke
across the four windows—
a hardwood fallen,
rotted orange, its bark
curled sheets sloughed off,
its thick stump splintered,
the red blond of raw red oak.
To cold light I wake
empty of what I was;
and sure of nothing
but windows and oaks,
and contented almost
to be contented
in contemplation
of oriental perspective—
the higher up each pane
the deeper the wood,
patches of snow becoming
patches of white sky—
I meditate upon
such distinctions
and indistinctions.
Three Birds in One Cypress
In a glimpse of its flying, its deep-mouth pouch,
I say pelican, but no, when it lands in the top
of the cypress, its blue-gray wings fold with grace.
A pelican never settles his elbows any way but
awkwardly. Now through binoculars, the pouch
stretches out, a neck curves up to an elegant
crown, a slip of black feather like a fashionable hat,
straight javelin beak, and directly in line with the beak
a
