Red Canna, 1924
Georgia O’Keeffe
You are not a flower but a firestorm,
nothing hotter than your reds and yellows,
the purple bleed of your exploding heart,
grief offered up gold as joy.
You are the hoped for Mardi Gras,
the Friday night of the soul.
Anyone who burrows into your lips,
the crackle of your flame,
anyone who wakes and wakes
in the stirring sheaves of your heart,
does not go home again.
Wild West Dirge
“Shoot me,” she said,
“before they come over the hill.”
With her last whiskey breath she said,
“Nice guitar!”
In fact she had gotten caught
the strings of his guitar
just as she had always wished
and the notes were
food and love and everything
with many o sounds
the way mournful was beautiful
and tears were cowboys
crying down her cheeks
and America was no kind
of song but every major chord
gone minor
with blackbirds heavy
in the branches
and freight trains lunging across
prairies silent with snow.
Such a stunning funeral! She was
waked by buffalo
and little Annie Oakley’s ghost
grown thick in the waist,
but her trigger finger shone silver
in the light of the corn moon
hung down from heaven,
and some cowboy’s horse
nickered in the dry streambed
when they found her body—
the rose of her mouth
amen-ing such a gospel
the Lord couldn’t ignore.
Samurai Sword
. . . a man was swinging a samurai sword
and I don’t know if it came to me in the sludge
of sleep or the voice on the radio while the coffee
steamed and hissed but a man was swinging
a samurai sword while a staggered V of geese
fluted above me as I stepped out into the new day
with all the old anxieties, buttoning every button
against the wind while leaves tore round my feet
and the secret tide of salt pressed upstream
towards Albany in the great river grey and stoic
where it could go no more but return to the sea
and I understood that something would be pierced
because that is what happens when a man is swinging
a samurai sword but I didn’t know what or who and when
but the river keeps flowing and the geese call
and the sun flames on the river like hot golden money
spending itself on the last day.
Dorothy Bradford
Drowned in Provincetown Harbor December 7, 1620
With the ballast, timber and beam
of the Old World unsteadily
beneath her, from the raw December deck
she watches the wave chop
as though it might suddenly reveal
an answer. She resists
studying the bleak shore bristling
with scrub pine, barren dunes.
William has assured her it is promising
and has gone with the rest of the men
in a shallop to reconnoiter a welcoming
location for the saints to settle.
Unsettled, she shivers
unable to smother images
of the young son left behind in Holland
where the waterways are tame—
not the stormy welter of the North Atlantic,
this world where free means
cold and blank and uninhabitable, where
each move, each breath calls
for saintly effort beyond anything
she can imagine.
Pay him no mind. The strangers
grumble mutinously
and she wonders if he will find
a sturdier wife to replace her,
for just at that moment a gull’s
hacking cry splits the air—
her cue to spill herself quietly
over the side
where the waters do not hesitate
to welcome her.
Holding Terror
down. I am always just
holding terror
down. What if she . . . What if
he . . . doesn’t mean what
she . . . What if two, or more,
collide?
If the surgeon
slips, or the last step
gives way. . . if the child
wandering the woods has
no bread crumbs
nothing
like it? What if
I cannot bear
morning’s fingers
prying open the day
or night’s full moon
whitewashing my bedroom
white pages
turning, turning into
the winking, yawning
round earth disengaging
from the universe
spinning away into falling
like falling in dreams
where we never feel
the bottom (waking
first) but now I shall know
that jettison, the way truth
bends metal, riddles
the windshield
while the wheel
comes off
in my hands, roadless
the sea
rolling in
restless, kelp-brimmed.
Pilgrims
A dog barks in solitary
obligation to the night
Shifting in their stalls,
cattle exhale sweet breath
Hills slip into morning
rising out of mists that linger,
reluctant for day’s clarity
The sun’s light is deflected, still,
to a feather pale moon
that dissipates into the milk sky
and earth heaves into morning,
afternoon, evening,
following the slap of tides,
the lunge of beast to its burden
and yearnings of men
who can recall no other home,
yet feel forever strange and amazed
here,
as if they had just stepped
off a ship from some far place
into the pitch and pith of this earth:
its birdsong—delirious,
its losses—stunning
Letting Go
I am finally free
of the dress,
the shoe,
desire for
the water in the glass,
sunny day.
No longer do I fear
the hours of the clock,
protocol
of disappointment,
the awful goodness
of good intentions.
I have learned how movement
is to be still,
how hunger
is a form of divinity,
and mystery,
the slow sifting
of one world into another.
Truth comes unexpected—
black wings in blue sky,
the cold, kissing moon.
Never what you think.
November’s War
The wind heaves a length
of cream-colored butcher’s paper
across the yard nearly
big enough to bag a body.
The leaves have been torn
from the trees and after
a pointless but violent skirmish,
a pile wells up at my back door
more than adequate
to cushion a fall.
Yes, I have prayed
but the wind sweeps
everything away until
the lawn is empty,
November’s sky scoured
of any soft notion of kindness
or mercy.
At sundown tarnished clouds
gather like commanders.
The night—one big powwow,
and morning—anybody’s call.