Lawn Bumps

The horseshoe print on the lawn

that started me down

on hooves

the carriage trade

a smart two wheeler running up the drive and Andrew

there at the wheel. No one had thought the horse’s shoes

would dig so at the turf. And no one ever dreamed I

would return years later and uncover the leaves to find

those same prints, the ones the horses made when

Andrew took them up the drive in midsummer.

“You seem such a stranger,” she said,

“when you look out onto the lawn, why

don’t you turn out the light? I’m sorry I

was cross today at the shower. It was all

those wild things under my feet with a sort

of U shape and I kept stumbling over them.

I think the shower should be put somewhere

inside the house, even if we do bring the sand

indoors with us, it’s better than that funny

smell out there and something running

under your feet.”

Because so much was said about being alive

and it was talked about boats and islands and

keeping cruisers drifting the way they were

supposed to

A brick is replaced here and else. To replace

what is left of the curtains. As the windfolds

other things. Like where that is disturbed

and the stumbling towards it.

And the maritime uses of quiet exists when it was carried down the lawn a kind of free booting as opposed to free looting which was what it was supposed to be. A series of inverted “U”s where the plaster had fallen and the timbers showed like grain and there appeared an ivory circumference like ears. A totality of expression in drips and dabs also was uncovered until the margins were released and the newspaper recovered.

A complex denuding of place once occupied

by house sitting on bumps. They were photographed

and afterwards the dance to the phonograph.

He arrived with his photographs. Actually stills.

We looked them over and remarked how much had

changed.

It proved our instincts to restore were correct.

Just possibly and with luck the house. The attic might remain

on top. Where the letter had said ma chère and a different

order was imposed like wisdom settling its accounts

although an opposite effect might be gained from the wind

arriving off shore. Someone might challenge

the wisdom of saddles being laid out to dry.

Units. The measure the glass takes to the handle,

nearly full. While birds in cry … on the veranda

the sounding of hurdles. Jumps. A neighing

as of wedding. Bells near the grass. An exclamation

with wisps lying near and some broken.

Yet the prints visible under the shifts of ice

where the key had been thrown. A winter court.

Usually the most stormy of us respond

Sometimes shipping in the harbor

Where the portrait hides.

Often waiting.

Housewifery, certain tricks with knives, the bay wind

Off setting them and their’s of a kind

Wilfully as clouds whimper near bridges

Desiring to settle somewhere

Cause trouble

Bits and pieces fall apart

As generations in their disguises remove a few

We like least

What resembled those hooves

Meaning our apartness from that golden grasping

The mazes and the greenery

The permissiveness of growing

Into our variousness

Further explanations covering up the moss

Even a form of inter-marriage

Lending strength to the lawn

With its rudeness

Heavy ways a firmer tread

Brightness like calico was only piece work

Yet with remembrance the ruddiness

meant a lot to the corners.

Losing the trail was more trouble than finding the beginning

which stood there as house, but the tale of the hooves

went beyond all that, faster, with more rhythm to its slices,

loping off branches and unsmoking the parental tree there

in the wind sloughing about bringing tears to the eyes

and the need for further equipment to handle the seamy

adventures sewn into the cloth where it was whole,

evocative like scent in the upstairs drawer. Or the Keds.

Decisive,

impregnable as temples their Indian temperament

obdurate as blue, a bright grazing

where warm draughts fell sideways on

elbow and hand like writing where there is order

of one kind

Lawn bumps leading to

assurances with their partial payments—

the river in the dark,

people eating beside it under lights or lanterns,

fishing at twilight,

canoes setting northward with strangers

interned in the futuristic cabins,

“Excessive disappointments after the premiere” and

“Animal behaviour the Balkans never knew”

the hooves bestowed their print