Flame to Ash

walking in drizzle on Parks Mill soil

comforts me so deeply I have no need

to write about it, no need to think

at all — this jonquil, this clump of

Leucojum, this fungal testicle stemmed

to a slit in a tree, this shallow swirling rippling

creek with rocks, & stones, & trees —

beside the creek a narrow channel, once

the race that spun the turbine, drove the rods

& ground the grain — the little red hen

would have shouldered her wheat here

her flour home again to bake her loaves —

across the road a dam, what for?

the creek overflows it, such short falls

a kayak might shoot & not capsize

imagine the ride, canoes would have to be

portaged — so many must have come in May

to gawk at Hymenocallis coronaria

now it’s late February, not a trace

of this largest spider lily, the bank of the creek

littered with quartz, moss, timber, needles

& miniscule nearly flowering plants —

Antennaria neglecta, velvet gray

called pussytoes, & Erythronium

americanum, pointed leaves trout

spotted, tight petals rimmed with yellow

ready to open & curl, flame to ash

To the Embalmers

G. C. Waldrep

i.m. Mahmoud Darwish

I went into the desert for the velvet flesh of two white fish.

And when the heat of the desert was withdrawn from me

I settled my chair by my heart’s black flame. A shepherd

taught me the echo of the stars’ exquisite math which sounds

in the night like a mesquite blossom. Small and golden

I approached the bridge I had left inside the unfinished book

where my faith lay dammed. Dip your finger in the rods

and cones of the desert’s perfect eye, all who could not die

were singing up to me. There is no “final rose,” I replied,

only a succession of beds on which the clouds take their blue

rest. In the arroyos a trickle of honey gathered in search

of the bees that had chained it to a prayer. I gazed into it

and saw my name spelled again in the worn boards

of a pine floor, a stitched cloth over which the brass gears

of my father’s war presided. My father went into the desert

for a new flag to drape over the sleeping body of my mother,

who had rubbed salt and cumin into the twin clefs

of her neck and shoulders after she, impoverished, received

the emperor’s summons. Now I ask the moon to testify

to my body’s chill, the unaccompanied music that bandages

the return of the dead. I have no patience and the almond

cake is bitter on my tongue. What am I to call you

when I see you freshly clothed in the catenaries of swallows?

I who chose exile from the land’s sleep-script, its strange

harvest borne upward by a wind from deep inside the earth.

If I go there now I will find another poet in my house

from which my Christ has wandered, a shadow falling clean

across the sea’s torn hem. I will follow Him into the smallest

wilderness. There is no Babylon like the soul’s Babylon,

its hanging garden wreathed in the voices of created things.

Strike the pen from my hand if I have misunderstood how

the dust returns to us, through the smallest dances.

In the coasts of my adoption I grow colder, I cross my chest

with a map of all the sun has denied. The temples lie

behind me now as the bodies of women. Breathe on me,

my childhood in the lost city of love. Let me be the only

casualty, the waking wound towards which the forest

of my fading heat is climbing. This is the basket I have plaited

for you, from strips torn out of the oldest monographs,

with the ocotillo’s passion. Beneath me, buried in rubble,

a silver is waiting to be born into such commerce as belief

may lend. You may name it for my body when you

meet it by day at the judgment seat, by night on the narrow

road that sheathes my brother-song, green with pine

boughs I have stolen from death and death’s trine passage.