Elegy
Early on in the city
on weekends claimed by fog
I came back to your farmstead,
your emptied creekside
shanty-house
from my laboratory wage work
with pockets full of micropipettes
and stolen white gloves as if to outfit a regiment
of ghost-butlers
in an imagined antebellum manor
neither of us, if offered, would inhabit—
but I still saw the manor’s cut crystal
glinting in night-frost on the fescue
beneath persimmon trees
where great horned owls left
bones to bleach. These nights
lately—with the fine rain singing
through ragweed, through mulberry
we’d kept for feeding ducks, the silkworm
farm we planned
to someday have—I swam
the wild wheat which shines
like a lake to far back acres. I unstrung
my jewelry, tarnishing from its work week
even still—in the city of sooted brick and grimy
air—from my neck
and wrists, spread the legs
of the wooden-runged ladder and hang
it in arcs inside the fig bower’s
ribcage or hay-rick,
displayed like ceremonial
specimens pinned to felt-lined glass cases
by the fig’s knobby twigs. Deprived of ceremony
I found nothing
in my hands but unmoored
symbols: I caught junebugs all night
one week in a jar to feed the ducks,
or once burnt so methodically old letters
from lovers and the First National Bank alike
as if a prayer summoning spirits
to the occasion could ever come
from cynics’ lips. To look down
for the layers of history cat’s-cradling
between us, which, unwillingly—
as algae on creek-stones
loosed downstream rejoins indistinct matter—
we forget.
After All This
The mountainsides
are empty, the crags
uninhabited.
Ash pits
have melted to dirt
beneath the fallen leaves. There are no shots.
No firelight
but yours. No train whistles
anymore,
or mail routes, no
riverboats or gasoline for chainsaws
or the dirtbikes
that had hummed across the valley.
No pack mules stepping carefully
sideways over the rusted chassis
of dirtbikes. No bullets,
no hunters, no fish
flashing
in the river. There is no one to track you
to your shelter, to steal your dog,
if you had one,
for food. No one
to learn your name and say it after moon
rise. The communiques
of the mountainside are spoor and paw-
print; they pattern the ground
just beyond
firefall. Without fear, the act of flight,
what would you have?