Keeping Touch (1)

Watching the films again, after closing the cottage down.

Listen for the voices summering     /adding
the silence/volumes up     /unschooled enough
or schooled by broomstraw and confecting     /explaining
the heart its skin and all the other edge-lines.
The streets we're trying hard to recognize     /and
the longest separated     /the longest unannounced
/descendingthese Cleveland steps     /in films
men made at the brink of the Depression—      and with them
your mother at fifteen     /sharing this warmth
and grin and birthday kiss with your great-grandmother
/almost the last one queued     /and older herself
than all these were     /teen-shy and thinking slopes
and glowing water     /unable to think someone
of us     /'27     /'28     /to think of herself let down
into the longest dream of decades.  So much
for the seasoned loaves     /for these fingers like our own
/dipping their bits of broken loaves in flavored oils
/for the years arranged as graceful steps and constancies
/requiring her shyness then  /shaking her head to shake
the falling hair away     /reminding the heart of skin     /of
moods and mixed assaults on a promotion
a fever of years arranged as boughs in front of us.  I think
of the mallards a hand unwraps     /the rabbits
a hand withdraws     /there in that deepest cabinet     /think
of the prints hands left on the chrome handles
and door-seals     /the doors of the ice-box happened on—
Liz/Elizabeth     —in this barn where horses
neighed the light to memory     /where horses might whinny
still     /playing in autumn light     /under
these shepherd clouds     /tugging the years ahead of them
/here where this old sled hangs in parts and seeming ready
/a weekend's owls made known     /and here
where the lemon-scents     /where the midnight's visiting
/remind us of screens we lifted down     /of shutters
we've screwed securely into places left to seasons
/darkening-in for lamplit winter anniversaries.

 

© Appetite (2)