All your sap is thickened towards survival.
About you there is no dapple of thought.
Sometimes in the evening there’s a retrieval
of old rings, old bangles. Otherwise
your tale is a stubborn root against wind.
There is no narrative in your veined eyes.
Even ice can melt and become water,
adventure. No, with bitter claws
you cling to the horned stick carved from nature,
the elegant deer’s head. At night
I hear you fumbling among furniture,
for beads, ribbons, dresses, moonlit rings.
The sea stings. It is older than you are.
Its brine is saltier than your tears.
It is a treasury of the wandering dead.
Sometimes at sunset it looks beautiful
with its strange roses among bitter green.
And in autumn moonlight how its roads converge!
Old lady, surely we are human.
But do not shut your eyes in your blindness,
nor your nostrils nor your wrinkled ears.
The crab noses the brine in the morning.
It feels through the vibrations of its shell
the constant music of the possible.
The lumpy wooden ones who rose from the dead,
there have been some of those. Consider the paintings
framed in the Renaissance, and still bright.
On wooden wings they rose towards feathers,
the Dutch ones too in their sabots, from their kitchens.
On their dishes a various light shone.
The lumpy ones became angels.
They sprouted from earthly dressers towards heaven.
They left a trail of bronze chains behind
and a little dog looking towards them
as their rough heels turned golden, and their bodies
filled as with water unfathomably grave.
To be human is to be a river
reflecting new pictures, flowing on
deftly, imperfectly, towards the future.
Loves, ruins, weddings, rest in it,
brides with white dresses descending
raptly from clouds of the minute.
Exactly so, difficult old woman,
thorny-voiced, thorny-wristed, slow
rancours seething from your waste moon.
Indignities of the posthumous.
I love tragic heroes in the storm
profiled thriftlessly against space,
but you tick like an old clock.
Useless above the grave your gaunt face,
useless the bony chair in which you rock.