WEALTHY AT LAST

First the radios
Brought in crackling sounds
From the edges of the world.
A few stray notes mixed in like ants saying prayers,
Then real songs squawked all night from red paper birds
That kited across the old blue sheets of sky.

The whales in the sea had sung before,
We'd had their tunes on vinyl, singing with Judy Collins
But now they came right up to the seawall,
With a fresh attitude, and roaring like zoo lions,
Demanding lunch, some with faces like Alfred Hitchcock.
The children said they'd first heard them in ponds
Out past the outskirts of town.

Then far away the roads in mountain passes began to crowd up
With animals that had fallen out of dreams.
Our grandfathers had painted them on the walls of caves,
Celebrated them, learned to talk by singing about them.
And somehow they had kept breathing all this time.

Now suddenly they're here, they're coming down the ramps.
Their leaders carry signs that explain their policies.

And we too have been released.
All the books made a little squeak and went blank
Well, the animals are finally back in town!
And wealthy at last, we take to the roads,
Arriving at any destination,
Dressed in new robes,
Still strangers but welcome at last to each other
In the rainstorm broken by sun.

WHY WE ARE STILL MARRIED

In those days the river
Combed blackberries from its beard all night.
The field by our woods was drenched with cold dew.
By morning our room was filled with many breaths.

By this time we were already married.
The top drawer of the chest
Ticked under its own weight as we slept,
Packed with ice.
I got up quietly to check.

Yes, digging in I discovered
Fish laid neatly in rows.

My purple lips turned
And found you in the dark.
Outside a cloud shaped like Myra
Hung above the hill,
Watching our window, unlit.

NEW HOUSE

Hung in its scar on the hill
The new house, childish as a barn
A new colt dumped in the pasture.

Curtainless illiterate rooms
Display in freeze frame for the first time
The ancient text of window and star.

We find the exact middle of the thing and sit
Beside our fire, where green wood
Screams at us from its brick cave
Like sour flutes.

We can have no rest
In this furniture.
No sleep.
The walls don't recognize us
Gawk at us
And will not leave.

LOLITA'S MOTHER

A particularity of bird,
Your stomach is cabbage green, You are
A bag of bespeckled moons, but zipperless.

My lost ring you took and hammered into a crown on the anvil of air.
You have probably aged, have certainly become fat,
A dictionary noun
Like Lolita’s mother, trapped in your house,
Screaming into the telephone for pizza.
Ironic. The unrecognizable milk-fed genius
Of “three quarters of the way up”
Is now thought to be a nobody.

My arms snatch at you like a python
And miss. You, peeking from your temple,
Demurely spit on the wrinkled sheet of the bed,
Mistaking it possibly for the sea,

HEAT AND DARKNESS

Encircled in your arms
I am a sea.
Small and far north,
The tiny ship, heavy with flags
Crawls through snow across the dark bed.
Before morning I watch my heart go down.
The decks swarm for a moment, then comes the dark water,
And the radio goes dead.

At breakfast under yellow windows
I sit again in dry light
Your hands,
So thin they look broken,
Holding your cup not quite straight.

I put my ear to your wrist.
Your other voice falls silent.
Who can interpret the small cries of the blood?
In your pulse I hear
The secret place of heat and darkness
The world below color
Where molecules like clear roses
Hammer in the sealed rooms of the skin.

THE NEWCOMER

After a dark week
I awake in the beautiful old country
In a bedroom watery with sun.

From great distance the sound of rain
Is breaking over mountains.
Beneath the window wet lawns
Descend evenly to the river
Where steadily as clocks
Carp swirl red fins beneath flies.

Farther down, a man is poling a skiff
Off the southern part of the landscape
As at morning a dream is driven off the captured mind.

The night is draining from the land.
Sunday. The forty days and nights of Noah have passed.
A newcomer, I open the door and step out into the morning.

Breaking with joy, my arms fill with flowers.

PEACH FINGER MOUNTAIN

Opposed by most, summer packs up and leaves the neighborhood.
Our neighbor lady didn’t like the heat, never will.
By noon I reach the edge of town.

Taking the trail by the river, dandelions tickle my socks.
The water slips over the pebbles, obeys the rule of God,
Knows what speed it needs to make to get to the ocean by dark.

Engrossed in its work it asks no questions.
The sky tries again to explain the weather's reasoning,
But I fail to respond as though ignorant
The white fingernail atop Peach-Finger Mountain keeps my chin lifted up.