To the man in the pickup truck who screamed obscenities at my 15-year-old sister
When the end comes for you, know this:
Mercy is the girl in an ultramarine dress.
Mercy is the girl with a Renoir face
bending to speak with a small boy
who helps her water the sun-withered garden.
Mercy is blithe, beams unburdened
because I will be the pool of twilight sounds
cloaking the noise of your crawler’s shape,
I will be the moonlight’s crescent
tendrils lashing you in place,
I will be the sphinx moth she follows
away into hours of delicious rain.
Look: streams of blue roses trail
from her hem, pour into a widening sea.
* * * * *
Full Moon and a Storm Coming, You Tell Me
Your grandma used to call them hurrycanes
in her foamy Cape Cod accent. She knew
the slower the storm, the greater the loss.
Her house was near four hundred years old, built
in a town the glassworks chose not for sand
but for its trees, long burnt. Under tough boards
and rag rugs she braided nor’easter nights,
surges washed through the dirt foundation, seeped
out, harmless. On the street the marsh pooled high
as her back’s mean swerve—but her raspberries
spared, you made jam. Paraffin seals cooled white
like the cones empty berries leave behind,
white like this sturgeon moon’s spring tide, white like
the ice she slipped on, the day she should’ve died.
* * * * *
Winter
No matter what I say,
All that I really love
Is the rain that flattens on the bay,
And the eel-grass in the cove;
— Edna St. Vincent Millay, from “Eel-grass”
In another life we were orchards
or we were storm-battered
shores, you say, peeling an orange
as if erosion and rootedness
were the same long sentence
ending in harvest or decay.
A train’s late. A long salt road
runs through the room, through us.
But you promised not to stay
no matter what I say.
Not that I would beg,
after days spent tallying
the expected dead,
to watch your fingers test
the eel-grass beds, or ask
to walk the slanted grove above
the wrack. When the wind blows
west my voice gives out:
if I wanted to, I couldn’t speak of
all that I really love.
The telephone cord’s tangled
again, silence waiting on the line,
and you’re the kind who trusts
herself to split rind from pith
without a slip. So tell me
to forget your taste, beaujolais
and brine, tell me to lose
how sunlight caught the steel
in your eyes. Tell me now — delay
is the rain that flattens on the bay.
When you go, nothing real
will change. I’ll still work late.
The train will still race
the road. I won’t miss you.
I’ll buy salt, I’ll make
soap from oranges and clove.
And when the tide’s laid low
you’ll remember where to find me:
embedded in the slanted grove
and the eel-grass in the cove.