Cold Pastoral. Rebecca Dunham
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of sea, the open
vein’s plumes,
how they wheel like
a maelstrom up and down.
My sight spills through
waves of old, blown
glass. I am not permitted
to turn, pillow to cheek,
and wait for sleep to find me.
Am not permitted
to learn how not to look.
ELEGY, WIND-WHIPPED
May 23, 2011, Joplin, Missouri
1. REFUSE
Doll hair—brown yarn—
loops round a hickory’s jagged
limb and she dances
the wind like a human body
clinched above
the gallows. See—your own
eyes stitched open as hers—
there is no difference, batting
or flesh, still you will
hang, emptied by my breath.
She could be dead. Easily
she could be your daughter.
2. HAMPSHIRE TERRACE
Search and mark with a spray-
painted X. Nothing left
to salvage. You do not like
to say it, but you need
the dogs. No tools you possess
can help you find silence.
We’re always hopeful but we briefed
the guys to plan for the worst.
Crowbar, chainsaw, chisel
you dig, hail beating.
In time, you think,
please let me be in time.
3. LIST
Tilt, slant, heel—a careening, a leaning, to one side. Incline. To please, to like, to desire. To cut away in narrow strips, stave and plank, to shear. To lister: to furrow the land—plow and drill—drop and cover. Who is the one that compiles? Roll clouds scroll the sky. Call it and we will listen: anything but there is no list, there is no list.
4. CATECHISM
What is the chief end of human life?
Sirens like a trumpet’s call.
Roll the beds to the hall
and pull the blinds—too late—
What reason have you for saying so?
Burst rose of sharded light.
IV lines ripped loose, beds thrown
against the wall, blood-drenched
What is the highest good of man?
and bathed in life. And these
are the lucky ones, the blessed
who walk among our ruin.
What is, what reason, what is
the good of man?
The very same. Bathed in life,
the burst rose. O sharded
light, sirens like a trumpet’s call.
5. BROKEN
Stripped and strafed—another
casualty—their skeletons
spear the sky. Shag-barked
hickory, catalpa, a 135-ringed oak.
Debris perches like turkey
vultures on their arms.
Each one, a splintered body
to be hewn and dragged out
of town, put to the pyre.
They deserve this much, at least.
Smoke masses, and
grief re-greens the sky.
6. MUCORMYCOSIS
puncture wound hard black
center —press—
let the pain remind you
what it means to survive
decay a petri dish leaf
mold and wood what the skin
admits all nature needs
to destroy you Spore
fr. spora sowing seed
I will see your toll and raise you
one hundred sixty-one
7. DOVECOTE
windows blown-in
and empty-socketed as a skull
against the hospital’s
bone-slabbed concrete—
roost, thou forsaken
—absence is its own home
ATAVISM AT TWILIGHT
Lance and drain this ravened sky—hat in hand we will
Always return to you, prodigal. I swear we knew
Not what we did. I swear. Land unscrubbed to rust,
Gashed and bare—hell’s toothed pastoral. No
Excuses. Pitchfork my soul, millet on your scale, but
Let not this harvest strip flesh from bones. Pray
Unsheathe your sword and make of my heart a ragged tear.
Salvage this earth, snarl grass and field. I will take it all.
BLACK HORIZON
Grand Isle, Louisiana, 2010
Post-Deepwater Horizon oil spill
Like ribbons of kelp, they wash up
bark-black and stretching
far as the eye can see—boys
sway in the waves, skin sheened
in oil as they toss the tar balls.
A quick game of pickup.
On the shore, cleanup crews
weave a path between beach
towels, Hazmat-suited,
shovel and plastic bag in hand.
It never fails to shock: dark
pools oiling sands of blinding
white.