Deus Irae

I knew a making hand that drew
a thing like morning on my lip.
Bright sun, chill dew. I licked
toward all I'd found. One
bone chiseled rock by one,
one umber painted cave by one
I came around. I do not eat my children now.
I let them make me new.



Scent, Light

Godlost and desperate, the rhythm of this afternoon
is no rhythm at all, just a tumble in a wooden hand,
with a wooden scentless rose, and the vase, the vase
where the rose goes is more a sidewalk
cracked and scumbled. The flower was not cut.
It grew there prying up the pavement, enduring
from a beginning between one slab and the next,
one thing and the next. Someone in a room far away
is singing this story. Beside her, another uses
his hands to measure a piano, soft, then loud,
and the sun expands to the breadth of its orange measure
always going down and always coming up in its October fat
and ascending to a pinpoint too bright to watch.



Discipline

Four-score and one, still fresh as seventy,
she rode me for the garbage I did not take out
as once on the shovel for the bare root lilacs
dying in the sun.

What a soul, what a succubus. Now
that lilac hedge is gone
and a Kennilworth roars before daylight
on a concrete pad. That house found other lives,
and all our gardening was lost.

What I remember now is being boy,
some woman that I loved
but did not lust for, only feared
when I spared time from love. I can't
account. I dug holes. One boy's tasks
can be arranged. I would have dug
to the middle of the earth.

Worn, I did a foot, but spared what could be spared
a while, and later stood drunken as a bee by the lilacs
breathing in what I could, and as they come again
I mean to trouble you with their touch in the nose,
the touch of paper skin, the diesel stink
before the sun comes up
as another man finds his work.

There's no having back, and no forgetting,
just a wish for fewer absences, less
softening rot. How can you wish honestly
to be forgiven what you've sent away?

The sky arches up like a stretching cat
these April mornings, and Daylight Saving Time's
mad dark disappears.

The next new morning of the world
will smell like a lilac, break against the mark
at the bottom of the beach-stairs
like a maiden saying "yes."