The Milk Hours for J.E.J., 1962-1993 and C.S.M.J., 2013- We lived overlooking the walls overlooking the cemetery.
The cemetery is where my father remains. We walked in the garden for what seemed like an hour but in reality must have been days. Cattail , heartseed --these words mean nothing to me. The room opens up into white and more white, sun outside between steeples. I remember, now, the milk hours, leaning over my daughter''s crib, dropping her ten, twelve pounds into the limp arms of her mother. The suckling sound as I crashed into sleep. My daughter, my father-- his son . The wet grass dew-speckled above him.
His face grows vague and then vaguer. From our porch I watch snow fall on bare firs. Why does it matter now--what gun, what type. Bluesmoke rises. The chopped copses glisten. Snowmelt smoothes the stone cuts of his name. *** April, Andromeda I am in this world, not self, not seed, not stamen-dusted pistil flicking in the wind--the eye sees past its limitations. Crushed petals in the dirt, I''m courting a horse with an apple, watching its white tail swish along the fence.
Somewhere, the galaxy spins. I smile at the cloudless sky. -- Continuum of frequencies, Ptolemy''s Almagest, the star charts called it Little Cloud -- chained constellations in The Book of Fixed Stars . Nova for new , cut fish for never . A heart held back for the knife. -- The opening of large tracts by the icecutters commonly causes a pond to break up earlier; for the water agitated by the wind even in cold weather wears away the surrounding ice. -- This morning I walked past rows of jeweled honeysuckle twining through the square links in an aluminum fence. They glistened in the sun, as they always do.
You could say their vines shuddered. -- Photographed by Isaac Roberts, 1887, again in 1899, the galaxy, the ruler of man, the pearling spiral takes its name from the area of sky in which it appears. Sussex, England, retrograde motion. The daughter chained to a rock. -- We forget rapidly what should be forgotten. The universalsense of fables and anecdotes is marked by our tendency to forgetname and date and geography. "How in the right are childrento forget name and date and place." -- Pained loveliness--the sonnet sweet fetter''d.
Morning, still, couched in narrative--carrots taken from my palm. Horse nose, its silken touch, teeth against the skin. The eye sees the mind sees crushed pedals in the pestle. All parts are binding. -- Constellations--huge man wearing a crown, upside down with respect to the eclipse. The smaller figure next to him sitting on a chair. A whale somewhere beneath it. -- By ear industrious--attention met--misers of sound and syllable.
See kale, see rows of collard stalks--think Cassiopeia . Think arrogant and vain. Greek models, sea monster Cetus, the errant study of. -- I shall ere long paint to you--as one can without canvas--the true form of the whale-- my parts are all binding-- as he actually appears to the eye-- I wonder, now, how Ovid did it-- I pass that matter by. *** Driving Arizona Saguaro in headlights, we touch like foreign bodies. Sedona recedes against the sky''s aperture. Roll the covers off, the coldness in Williams-- Aren''t you afraid? I''m afraid, too. Wanting to know you, thinking I do, Thinking of the miles unfolding before us, The highway beating through rows of golden cacti.
I want to remember things purely, to see them As they are without the urge to order. To take the pictures down, and say what hurts. Say we''re able to enjoy this more than we ever did. Somewhere behind us, the mountains slope off. Sunrise breaks over fields of whitened heather. Let''s only sit and listen. Only stare at the open earth Without saying why. If approximations are the best We can do--fine then, let''s approximate.
Home is a question and we''re drifting from it. *** Chthonic My light bulb is gone. It was dying anyways. The room goes dark before I sleep. I lie eyes closed, listening, hoping the radio waves cause only one type of sick. My bed''s not safe. The feathers in my pillow came from a factory in Beijing. Their birds fly east in the shape of a V .
On the edge where my mother sat reading a bright picture book something has taken her place. My father''s mouth, which I lost years ago, speaks from a jar on the shelf. I ask my mother what she did with the light. She says it''s under the bed. I ask my father why he can''t hear. He tells me he''s underground.