your insidious eloquence makes me seek the
plain dealing of the woods, the dark, the clear
stars: and your refinement, a line so thinly
held I can’t tell which side will break from
snide tittering into howling mockery: (a little
extra humidity over, say, recent days has
turned the streets into rivers, embankments
into rubble, and this morning it all turned
into snow—the pink tulip trees luminous
under their clusters of white; the crabapple
blossoms, though, ready to radiate, frozen
out of their sockets, could be, and everywhere
gushy mush cushions the walkways: it is, of
course, Mother’s Day, May 11, a good day for
corsages’ metallic glaze and fern lace: my
mother is dead and gone, a death 46 years old,
but a death as close as the next cell of my
brain: when in distress with her young brood,
as many dying as living, she cried out “give
me the roses while I live” I had no roses
and the distress taken up into myself, I had
the impoverishment of hysteria, my mouth at
times as I bent over leaking like a fountain,
my dreams full of stiff figures that tried to
move: now that I have whatever I want, coin
or flower, I can give nothing back, the
lips cannot find a smile, the hands cannot
ease into the lap, the eyes cannot light with
calm): how does the magician, who makes reality
vanish, feel when his infected thumb throbs
and a pink streak or two rimes its way up his
arm: does the magic vanish like an imp
shrieking with mischievous delight: I say,
does the magic of reality take revenge:
well, so it is with the weavers of language
and their cunning cloths that string out of
vestments or take the material out of presences
some day these weavers will be the object of
their practices, and the present will present
them with no present of escape: tell true:
speak plain: deal openly: shed deceit:
these yield no room to the coming round of the
other side: TWO THOUSAND YEARS OF TRASH