.
At The Mystic Aquarium
Still sun blind, I wheel your chair
through the darkened room to the largest tank
where hammerheads swim in the aquamarine glow,
the torpedo bodies sleeking
past you beyond the glass.
Wanting respite from the heavy pushing,
unburdened time to take in the small brilliant lives
of reef fish, for once, I leave you, brake on and safe.
But when I turn away into the milling crowd,
it is I who fall--only a few feet from you,
tripping over a small girl, my body,
crashing down on her, her arms flailing,
trying to fight it back.
She rips out a cry, and her mother snatches her up,
snaps at me in anger.
Sorry. Sorry. I say again and again
as I try to struggle to my feet,
straining against the dark and the gravity,
thinking how hard it is to rise
from the downthrust of weight and age,
aware of shame's bloodrush, tears beginning
as if I were the hurt child,
the one who needed saving.
Suddenly I hate
your wheelchair, the knees that will not hold you,
your blocked heart.
I want you here at my elbow, your hand
pulling me up, comforts in my ear.
But you've never even noticed, hooked as you are
to the aqua light, flashing points of the teeth,
the flat, implacable eyes.
Frozen
(in memory of R.D. 1941-47)
At first the snowflakes were so huge
they cast shadows and we walked out,
three children luminous with snowlight,
farther and farther across the field.
We wanted to know what lay beyond the market gardens,
wanted to go beyond anyone's care or knowing.
What we found in the drained light of late afternoon
was an oak, three-stories, haunted--the only tree
among the frozen ruts and stalks that lined the riverbank.
Snow quickened, swallowed the upper branches,
slivered to sleet until the landscape vanished;
last leaves shook dried death rattles.
We would not say we were frightened
in the whiteout, in darkness coming down.
Beyond the sound of any voice calling us home,
we burned with cold as we stood in the glazed
circle of black ice. A knothole, cistern-deep
and dark, threatened to pull us in.
We did not know that by morning
one of us would get lost in the shortcut home,
that the world would be changed forever,
that our first death hung over us.
Lamentation
No one could bury you.
In the year of no snow--no softness--
the ground froze hard as a tomb.
You died in the season's deadlock.
In the year of no snow, no softness
until spring you lay in the charnel house.
You died in the season's deadlock--
the grass grown brown and sleet-enameled.
Until spring you lay in the charnel house--
the roses, winter-killed, earth solid with ice--
the grass grown brown and sleet-enameled.
Deer froze to stone on the mountain.
Earth solid with ice--the roses, winter-killed,
the ground froze hard as a tomb.
Deer froze to stone on the mountain--
no one, not anyone, could bury you.
Winter Sky over Cheshire County, New Hampshire
You are all blue-bruise and magenta where clouds hunch
above the mahogany tree-trunks.
Above them, you fly up, dove-gray for miles.
All day I've watched you transmute:
lemon, nativity blue, flesh of broiled salmon.
All day you shift shapes: buffing-cloth, rock-field,
ocean roiling spit and spume.
I would paint you
if you could stop, stay pinned on the canvas
of my eye. But you
are wily--you leap up, the wind takes you, the turning
earth takes you. Oh you are scent of ginger, cardamom, peppermint.
You smooth my forehead with a dew-moistened glove.
You ring like a church bell.
clang two spoons together, bang pans and dance.
To keep you, I swallow you whole; my abdomen swells
with your thousand colors, explodes with your light.
When Women Went Downtown
The city was brick and stone in the time
before glass and steel. In those days
the city was streets of women.
They climbed down from buses
in seal skin, navy straw hats stuck with pearl drop pins,
their double-knotted Red Cross shoes,
clutching black cowhide purses, leading the children.
They lunched in tea rooms
on chicken-a-la-king and quartered sandwiches
but never wine--and never with men.
Rising in the smoky air,
their voices blended--silver striking off silver.
They haunted book rental booths,
combed aisles of threads and zippers,
climbed to the theater balconies, the palaces
where Astaire dipped and turned them
into more than they were.
In the late afternoons they crowded the winter dusk
waiting at the Isle-of-Safety, for the bus
with the right name to carry them home
to the simmer of soup on the stove,
the fire's sweet red milk.
Evenings, far over the tiny houses
the wind swept the black pines like a broom,
stars swirled in their boiling cauldron of indigo
and the children floated to sleep to the women's song
zipping the night together, to the story
of the snow goose who went farther and farther
and never returned.
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