Elegy

Wind buffs the waterstained stone cupids and shakes

Old rain from the pines’ low branches, small change

Spilling over the graves the years have smashed

With a hammer—forget this, forget that, leave no

Stone unturned. The grass grows high, sweet-smelling,

Many-footed, ever-running. No one tends it. No

One comes....And where am I now?....Is this a beginning,

A middle, or an end?....Before I knew you I stood

In this place. Now I forsake the past as I knew it

To feed you into it. But that is not right. You step

Into it. I find you here, in the shifting grass,

In the late light, as if you had always been here.

Behind you two torn black cedars flame white

Against the darkening fields....If you turn to me,

Quiet man? If you turn? If I speak softly?

If I say, Take off, take off your glasses....Let me see

Your sightless eyes?....I will be beautiful then....

Look, the heart moves as the moths do, scuttering

Like a child’s thoughts above this broken stone

And that. And I lie down. I lie down in the long grass,

Something I am not given to doing, and I feel

The weight of your hand on my belly, and the wind

Parts the grasses, and the distance spills through—

The glassy fields, the black black earth, the pale air

Streaming headlong toward the abbey’s far stones

And streaming back again....The drowned scent of lilacs

By the abbey, it is a drug. It drives one senseless.

It drives one blind. You can cup the enormous lilac cones

In your hands—ripened, weightless, and taut—

And it is like holding someone’s heart in your hands,

Or holding a cloud of moths. I lift them up, my hands.

Grave man, bend toward me. Lay your face....here....

Rest....! took the stalks of the dead wisteria

From the glass jar propped against the open grave

And put in the shell-shaped yellow wildflowers

I picked along the road. I cannot name them.

Bread and butter, perhaps. I am not good

With names. But nameless you walked toward me

And I knew you, a swelling in the heart,

A silence in the heart, the wild wind-blown grass

Burning—as the sun falls below the earth—

Brighter than a bed of lilies struck by snow.