Song For An Old Tree

The birds stripped the old tree

Of its fruit

In a single night.

Was it a dream, how they descended

From the sun--

The ravening eclipse?

Thirty years, not a stump remains

Of the orchard,

Only a field of mown grass.

Where the roots sucked everything

From the soil

There are shallow bowls.

My two girls appear, one singing,

One shouting,

Beseeching with arms wide.

Each day I reach up like branches

Into the light

To be devoured by caresses.

Ornament

And tomorrow is Christmas,

the heart’s havoc with delight.

Downstairs, the unnatural tree

dressed in glass and light,

pulses with memories.

Will my daughters see the ornament?

Will they see, as I saw,

watching for hours once,

the orb darkened by green-tinseled boughs

radiating needles,

crystal spark moon beam

still and silent as time itself?

Will they see the heart

that moved two hands to place it there?

The Spot

As a child, in times of transition,

moving in, away, or up a class,

I’d choose a spot of no distinction,

eaves elbow or dirty pane of glass,

seen daily, in passing, from bus or car,

and call that spot up to memory,

my own version of a wishing star,

proof not everything is temporary.

Solemnly naming the spot my own,

commanding it, above all worthier

bits of the universe, to stand alone,

I’d whisper, If I do not remember

this spot the next time I go this way,

even if I remember some other time,

all that I have seen and done today,

and this spot, will no longer be mine.

So many years later, I still attempt

to make of humble, unnoticed things

what they do not seem, to exempt

the passing car or the cardinal’s wings

from the stopwatch’s oblivious tick.

But now the simile and the metaphor

so complicate things that when I pick

a spot that should mean no more

than what it is, like a broken sidewalk

or tree stump—you see what I mean—

the thing comes alive, begins to talk,

turns to words on a computer screen.

Miro's "The Farm"

Revenged in sleep, yes, a good omen:

volcano, eggplant, hawk feather

conditioning a moment of pure certainty,

instead of remorse. Birdsong dissolves

the hard black shell of their dream.

She breathes deeply, counts the number

of all those living and gives thanks.

Her skin moves over bone like sad music,

a lamentation of slow recognition.

She thinks, The next is tree across a gorge,

a trick of the eye, a drunk’s progress,

the balanced walk soon elbows and knees,

the hopeful ephemerality of creeping

going lower, the rigid belly at rest

on the gnarled limb tapering to a twig—

pointing finger arrested in emphasis.

Fear zero, the unimaginable destiny.

She twists her body like a swimmer turning

backstroke into butterfly, affirming

things still work beneath the bedclothes.

She stretches to call the nurses: sun

a push button set in pale blue sky;

water can, milk pail, red tile, hedgerow;

plowed and seeded earth pocked by rain;

rafters, stepladder, goat bleat, cockcrow;

the fox’s daily raiding of the hen house;

the baby’s naked footprints in dried mud;

snail, calendar, chain link fence;

stones everywhere, endless hard work;

how her back bent beneath wet laundry,

milk, hay, dung, branches, children;

how it arched aching when her sun-fired

husband’s body pierced her in the shade.

The holy triangle: husband, children, self,

grown geometrically into a power of itself.

She remembers the fruit silk and sap smell

of the tree that grew in the center of the yard,

its branches arms with a hundred umbrellas.

In autumn, its shapeless, colorless body

stood like Death attempting resurrection.

Euphorbia (The Marriage Plant)

It is sometimes mistaken for

the crown of thorns.

Rooted in a two gallon pot,

the mottled spurge—

false cactus, candelabra plant,

hat rack cactus,

dragon bones—

thirty-five years ago was

one small stalk.

Now it’s man-tall, a dozen

bunched, angled,

and deeply scalloped branches

with black thorns.

It does not flower in captivity.

Its acrid milk

sap is slightly poisonous. In India

they brew up a hot jam to purge

rheumatism.

It rots in much water, thrives

on light reflected

off pale walls.

Cut and pot a limb, in a year

it will look exactly like the mother

plant: how we render it eternal.

Stevens

Before the last ending of autumn,

A startled cry from inside

Seemed like a mind in its sound.

I knew only what I had heard,

A baby’s cry, at midnight or after,

Above the late November wind.

The moon was rising at two,

Once a crumpled mask above dead leaves . . .

It could not be inside.

Not from the chiaroscuro

Of sleep’s faded paper sky . . .

The moon wasn’t coming inside.

That startled cry—it was

A tone whose song preceded tuning.

It was nothing like the old moon,

Surrounded by its echoic tone

Being right here. It was what

I’ve always known to be real.

The Brook

The brook ran through high mountain pasture

From failing glacier to pool to pond to lake,

Between banks limned with moss and aster

Rooted in cascades of shattered igneous flake.

I straddled the water running slow over stones,

My boots precariously gripping boulders

The water’s rilling shaped into hipbones.

Further up hunched matching shoulders.

I found a head and rolled it in, midstream.

The shallow, muttering water, unperturbed,

Flowed around and on like a vanished dream.

Provoked, I left not a rock undisturbed

And rolled them in -- the addled stream burst

Banks and drowned the mountain pasture’s thirst.

The Pileated Woodpecker

Fly-fishing,

I stand mid-stream and thigh deep,

line trailing.

Fleet shadow on the water . . .

up,

the bird

drops on wind, lands in a birch. I’ve

never seen

one before. No thought of fish now.

For full ten

minutes I gape.

He stays.

I

step on land

careful to keep the tree he’s in

in focus.

He hops behind the trunk as

I circle.

A full circle

and no bird.

Three dull taps.

Three more. He’s in

another tree

behind me.

He falls, drops across the river,

twice beats wing,

lights on a dead beach.

I am soon

waist deep ten feet beneath him.

He must fear the threat from land,

not water.

Now I am his and see

all

of him clear:

the blood crest and zebra throat,

the black sheen

of his back, the stiff feathers

he grasps bark

with,

crampon-like,

dangling

underneath.

Infinitely patient he is

listening.

Infinitely insistent,

he hammers

in threes and sevens and eights,

each

beat

stressed.

Something not

one man in all the world could do.

He chops from two sides just like a

lumberjack.

Bark chips and wood dust

rain down

on my head.

A hand-shaped

patch he clears of bark then drills

a thumb hole,

then seems to give up (or has tongued

the gummy larvae)

and moves on.

Imagine

that sticky membrane sheathed in iron.

All this is

repeated and repeated and

nothing quells

his hunger

or blunts his intent.

He has mind:

curious, cruel, incisive,

reasoning—

he solves problems, remembers,

is cunning

(if not wicked), devious, his

consciousness

a thing that has come before and

after me.

I do not hear his wild call

even once.

Leaving first,

I take no pleasure

but rightness.

The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors (The Large Glass), Duchamp

Red lines pressed upon the large glass—

a clear field where small acts take place.

Her gaze lost in three tissues of cloud,

her waist in stays closing off the air,

she’s mad and will not greet her suitors.

Beyond the street—dust collecting in homes’

new windows, grit loosening from shingles.

She watches children teach birds to kneel.

Her priest instructs: In prayer you whistle

because god grows old and only birds

can make a sound to pierce his tired ear.

Oaken wainscoting, parquet floors, the house

beneath a coat of white paint; white curtains

adorn the flat shoulders of the window seat,

where she sat as a child, her back to the street,

and memorized the rattle’s conversation.

The pad of flesh between her lips dances:

Tell us, Old Town, the color of your buildings,

like sawdust of the ancient windbreak blighted,

shown no pity by the time, taken at the fullness

of its usefulness, and what will bring it back?

Show us trees descending staircases.

Explain the wind. Don’t show us what it blows.

One man will know the whiteness of her body.

It will cost money to fill her with his fluid.

Shirking his vigil duty, a drunk male

slips from his tin coat and runs away—

his scream knocks a cloud out of the sky.

The other eight, glazed by window sweat,

spin in place, fool with spoons, sip

from hot cups the taste of her nipples.

Beneath the floor hard earth holds back

the odor that aspires to ghosthood and hopes

one day to mount the basement steps.

Note: The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass),

by Marcel Duchamp, is installed at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.