My Daughters’ Discourse on Beauty,
As June Begins and the Bombing Continues
Long pendents of flowers hang from the
black locusts,
Willows have unrolled into green; under
them in deep shade, past
Newly turned fields, phlox are blooming
and my daughter
Pronounces them as "beauty", not beautiful
she insists-
Something more absolute she sees in their
pooling, passing them
Each day, summer beginning to heighten beyond
the trees.
She wants to dig up a clump and plant it
in our garden,
Rank, wild, letting it spread: does it then
turn from beauty
To beautiful, spreading to become ornaments
in the uneasy air.
This morning, listening to you and your
sister proclaim the world
Again, full of beauty, seeing forests where
the tree-line abuts
A sprawl of houses, and faintly the radio,
turned down to listen to you,
Reports capitals bombed in the night half
a world away, beauty
Must be the domain of innocence, beyond
ditch-line and pasturing cows.
Reflecting, that must be criminal, the
slippage of events
While trotting out the personal-or is that
side-long glance the only one
Afforded me, driving toward town, one not
as famous as Rambouillet,
But as obscure as Rezela or Urosevac, beyond
where I turn off a marker
Notes a burial site and beyond that another
marking a lost encampment
Of the Seneca; in early photographs the
land was cleared bare, one tree perhaps,
A house, and beyond that the gray cataract
where sky and dust collude.
Names mentioned, then drawn into the air,
drifted into dust,
Settling among the phlox I forget to look
for again, before writing this,
Too intent on the road ahead, a failing
I would say of fathers,
Watching what might stray from the edge,
deer or squirrel,
While my daughters have the far fields for
themselves
To watch, looking for another sign-and found,
urge me off the road,
To run through the grass, as I watch, summer
beginning to blister the shade.
Deer at the Corner
of the House
Sight takes place at the edge, around
corners, along snow-sagged
Fences, cutting across spirea flattened
under a mat of white.
Looking straight ahead is dangerous for
what can be
Missed, not that answers slide along this
corridor of hedge and pine,
Coming to us by luck, not that answers even
move
In the snow-stirred air, as though someone
had passed by, as they have
Before, in the early morning before light,
here and elsewhere,
Never to arrive again, like deer at the
corner
Of the empty white house above the ravine,
caught sight of
By the luck of passing by not too quickly
that day--they must come
Out of hunger, the snow too deep to paw
out shoots,
The branches ringed like a shell’s suture
with new buds,
Maroon and hard--then they turn, as though
the short nights
Of August were already here, the gardens
full, and no one on this path.
Following
a Windbreak into Woods
A crust of snow follows the windbreaks,
the fields otherwise
Clear, steam-hung in the early morning,
the ground thawed,
The first green runners in the brown thatch
of old crop and weed.
Now we can see the damage, certain and undisguised
Before canopies of leaves drape twisted
branches, torn
Bark, heartwood jagged as a dog’s tooth.
The ground wrung with snow-melt, too soft
to hold
An ash or maple--toppled with the last heavy
snow.
The shape of the woods will not be the same
when we follow
This track tomorrow: the leafless branches
will be beaded before
A crew with saws come through to cut the
broken down, to keep
The stream from ponding-up, the soft yellow
sawdust spreading
Through a stand of maple saplings cut to
the ground, and past the woods,
The fields yellow as split poplar wood spread.
Looking East, From
Pre-Emption
At this point on Pre-Emption, looking
east, is also looking across
And down: the lake, a slice of blue, possible
only because of fields cleared,
Before hidden from the uplands, by hardwoods.
The sky tilts closer at this height, the
hills an illusion of summits, carved
From glacial pushes: turn the soil, stones
ground to roundness spill
From the shovel. Vista or perspective predicated
on the clarity
Of space, fields made and encumbered by
only air, and bounded
By a thin line of pears or stooped willows.
Our sight glides down and across
The moraines, accumulating the measure of
space, as though emptiness was
The measure of possibility, the uplands
discerned once the slope
Was tilled: coming here now, it seems this
always was, even the woods downhill
Are new growth: we wait, hoping something
will step from the tree-line
That no one remembers when it was last seen
before, last trapped or shot, pegged
And stretched, but nothing does, the fields
wait at the edge, beyond surprise.
Relic
Coming first from the south before a storm:
the wind warm, we imagine
Exotics driven in the evening clouds over
unknown trees.
Then the wind backing around to the northwest,
with the wood-rot scent
Of snow late in the season, I will hear
the geese
Overhead in the morning, again, as though
they had lost their place,
Circling in the heavy falling snow, the
lake below eclipsed
By steam, the trees falling into their shadows,
The news always arriving, to be turned over
as a relic
Even though it seemed to be still happening,
a voice coming to us
Accounting the burst of azalea, while here,
the geese
No longer of the numbers once recounted,
continue to remember
As they recompose their flight, the snow
sliding
From their bodies, following their one call,
the slate
Water glints, at the same time things moving
together and apart.
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