Death has one gleaming eye transfixed to the comings of fathers,
The second one to mothers is bound.
Make no suture or stitch to its blood-seeing.
Death, when you took the first mother,
The last son your undoing avows.

My grandmother had forgotten everything but the ability to be good,
Innate courtliness sitting like a castle upon a moor.
Her world of insensate rains and fogs and heaths,
And still the hearth flickering from her lost eyes.
My grandmother whom I adored, to all the world,
Your goodness will go unnoticed into night,
Just as your eyes stared unknowing
Before the subsuming of tides,
While the world blasted through your bones,
Breath without force of inspiration.

Here, love is the far proxy of look
- She is dying a distance -
Yours travels from brook to sky
To the heaven wanderings of death in my blood,
The black smoke-congested veins possessed
By the baffled realms of battlefield
By the horrors of the mundane
From this old mouth, emptied of kisses.

She walked out of the watercolor storm of a fresco
Like a cowl-bound form in a light drizzle of rain,
Her mosaic tiles of ancient lovers’ eyes, ceramic-borne,
Just as her hips held the curves of the urn, kiln-fired,
The coiled heat of Greece still stinging through her flesh.

For her, the treetops had been the summoners of storm,
In kind, she poured down the wet grove of her hair, electral,
Pantheress of humid breath and fanged flair of lightning,
Tamed once in the cloudy cage of Pentelic marble of the Parthenon.

But the world piled dust before her, baiting with its groveled roads,
For her black mullings, much-tasted rain, and heaven’s leaves to fall.
If only the Michelango-to-come had carved the clouds of her
For the light to remain, shining its centuries,
Then maybe the thunder would have been left undone.

A pig in the grass
Sounds at scratching and bratching,
Scratching and bratching are sounds
Of the world at its last.

A pine forest is the hand,
The soul of the palm fans out in fingers
Like the clayey striations of the sun.
The forest has no sound but the bonebreast
Wandering round of a similar hand,
All but shut now except for the unspoiled nest
Of browning needles and the ancient realmless mound of love.

The furrier tells the bell by the time of skinning,
Archangels by their clipped wings as they fell,
Statesmen by show of divided hands at plenary ringing,
The wind by quell of truant petals from daffodil.
And even love tells its beginnings and endings,
By lips shorn of lambswool words and yield of bale.
In light or darkness, though our animal souls uprisen,
Still in their wordless and naked measuring dwell.