*
the hour is thick, our tables full, our fields long again with cane
some sunny day you’ll offer me the laughter
of your life and I, heavy with moonwash
moving like smoke into your door, across
that amphibious plantation, will meet you crosswise,
Anne, with a summons: our seditious peace from the flood
from here invent a different biomass for goodness
because I have not understood your brief,
sprouting faiths, and I should say, this is this, not that
who can hope, bright as green, for such endings
and who could say, after this is a reward for all your waiting
if the poem must close, if hollow things must float
if some might say, after this wilting, you must be mad to write
any poem at all, Anne,
could your own fig tree be counted
as if a leaf, a stanza, and drown-proof as rain
in our split genealogies debated into somebody’s lost and found
come reprise these shellfire people aging in all our pages
*
gathered life, I remember no night watchman:
just our laughter drained into a stormed volt,
my wrench thrown at death
hiding in the carcass of an old boat
my head: a menagerie for every basin’s data pool
I come back bearing the gift of empty hands
and repentance, marked with godloss,
this fumbling law of the dead
I imagine the cocking noise of scalpels
falling into metal cans, and your surefire hands cooling,
Anne, slowing all the wild herds of compromise,
Kneading your one-hundred-pound bags of flour
by hand, by heart, every Saturday, 5:00 a.m. until midnight
listening for the first woman with the blaring
pockets or hands of her own practiced on the hazards of silent use
conveyed with the basic mathematics of asking for miracles
when the miracle feels like theft; the years never gave
what the years never gave and never
mind the logic, the circles it must make, I’ll make of logic
whatever; I’ll make of logic,
the sky and its mute thunder; I’ll make the days,
as my father made the garden, the gardener
tending the vast spaces from headstone to headstone
ringing the Sunday bell, my mother
was cloud, was rain, swapping places
with the street parking, lessening new blues, time—auctioned
I remember things but not what my mother said
who said two years; who said cancer
the way death makes sense of nothing, not even
the scattered planes; I remember nothing
my mother has said, listening all night to the rain, I see everything:
eyes, daggers, mouths, Anne, I’m as eager as sugar in the blood