The last word
1
in the beginning was the Word
I prefer
the quiet of water striders
or
the stream’s formless discourse
the
way wind scans and scales it
I admire the dandelion’s change of heart
how it goes
to ground
after
spreading its seed
now
the trees are in fatigues
2
Honeymoon stupid, we’d lie
spellbound by the spider’s craft:
it would hide behind a petal, sensing
the bee’s instinct was to suck
a nipple-pink rose.
I
should settle
for wine and song: my woman
sleeps in a winding sheet
that spider might shrink at.
3
Today I need to
retreat
from literature
but your
spectre licks my lips
for an elegy.
I
imagine
poetry as the figurehead
upon a
hulk: it fronts up
to the
estuary mud
where petrel dotterel whatever
nest. Once words were the first
petals in
the Mayflower’s calyx
and it
carried me away
to a new world;
now
the tide’s out
that flower’s dried. Butterflies suck
mineral
salts from the estuary
and pastoral conventions mend fences
no child climbs for an apple.
4
The garden swing still
misses you: it goes
over old ground
at double time. Without
our daughter I doubt
now if
I’d get through to you.
(But pupae of the gall midge
hatch eggs in their ovarioles;
larvae fritter the maternal
wall to this indifferent light.)
Shadow is your understudy—
an armband that gags
better than any wedding ring
a tender Yes….
The
familiar face
in a fantastic picture,
a girl inherits the family
graveyard. She hoards
weeds for their seeds
and will never be
empty-handed.
Streamlined like the silverfish
I find under piles of papers
she is
the last word: she….
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