ISSUE: Spring 1985
1.
The dead canes
snap from their roots,
traces of dark red
in their heartwood.
2.
Bad knee aching,
ankle clucking
like an old hen—
where is the something
transcending
everything?
3.
When I was young
I understood
the winter bed,
canes reaching like etchings
of only themselves
above the snow.
I could stand there whistling
over dead ground.
4.
New canes
from the same roots
endlessly spending them.
Brain-stem, spine-stem,
where are mine?
5.
Let weeds have the whole
god-abandoned world,
but I remember jars
of raspberry jam
in a chestnut cupboard,
so work the bed.
6.
On each jar, a label
in her own hand,
Raspberry, 1982,
the year she died.
I spread jam on bread,
and close my eyes.
7.
Leaf trembling down to leaf,
raindrops reaching ground.
8.
Are these the hours
of ensoulment, then,
by way of bees
from blossom to blossom?
9.
I stand by their bed at night,
hoping for a sign.
Rasp of cricket,
black-green.
10.
No one every made
a coffin of brittle raspberry wood
before this one,
and it’s a good one
for her to sleep in.
11
The berries darken
into dreamed red
droplets of blood
Tell me where I’ve been.
12.
A deerfly lands on my head.
I kneel lower,
to clusters hidden
in the shade.
13.
A slight wind in the leaves,
or something breathing,
or nothing.
14.
I close my eyes again.
If I’m alone here,
how can I see her
in the taste of berries?
15.
I lower this coffin
into the root-maze of autumn.
(for Irene Drachowski, 1914—1982)
