Poetry

Aging women mourn while they go to market,
buy fish, figs, tomatoes, enough today to
feed the wolf asleep underneath the table
who wakes from what dream?

This was before the time of lithium and Zoloft

before mood stabilizers and anxiolytics

and almost all the psychotropic drugs, but not before thorazine,

which the suicide O’Laughlin called “handcuffs for the mind.”

It took that pause to make him realize
The mountain he was climbing had the slant
As of a book held up before his eyes

There’s first a gloveless hand warm from my pocket,
A perch and resting place ‘twixt wood and wood,
Bright-black-eyed silvery creature, brushed with brown

The land was ours before we were the land’s.
She was our land more than a hundred years
Before we were her people. She was ours

She is as in a field a silken tent
At midday when a sunny summer breeze
Has dried the dew and all its ropes relent

One misty evening, one another’s guide,
We two were groping down a Malvern side
The last wet fields and dripping hedges home.

Back out of all this now too much for us,
Back in a time made simple by the loss
Of detail, burned, dissolved, and broken off

The grade surmounted we were speeding high
Through level mountains nothing to the eye
But scrub oak, scrub oak and the lack of earth

The road at the top of the rise
Seems to come to an end
And take off into the skies.