My Aunt Lily is dead in St. Louis.
She was a seamstress.
The family is angry and mourning.
Aunt Lily was laid out in a plain black dress
crudely stitched by a tailor at the funeral home.
I am not angry, I didn’t know her very well.
A dress is nothing to mourn at the end of a life.

Yesterday I found a young blue heron in the marsh.
I held it gently, stroked its long throat,
listened to it rasp in terror or contentment; how do you know?
My brother wanted to take it home
but I knew some adult would make us bring it back.
So I set it down and we went to look for frogs,
when I looked back the heron was gone
as if it had turned into a reed, become some dark space
where we would never dream to look.

Today they buried Aunt Lily, in her poor black dress.
She is in the world beneath dirt, where worms work slowly
to empty the long box of everything but the black dress,
bones and her hard white teeth.
The adults weep as they need to. I think they knew her well.
My mother said Lily is in heaven sewing robes for the angels.
I think there is nothing left of her but a sewing kit, a mannequin
and a few bolts of cloth.
I think I’m the only one here who believes that.
When I look around at my family, praying and weeping
all I can think about is that blue heron
turning into a reed, becoming some dark space
where no one ever dreams to look.

Strange bird,
His song remains secret.

He worked and he read,
drank a few beers and laughed.
There was no other way.
Fifty years in the 3M plant a dustless sterile place –
his place in this world.

Murdered, I was left to rise from this black ditch of a river.
A black Missouri swan
rising from the chemical tar of this strange water.
The Missouri River,
a tomb from which to rise.

Hatred could have been the shuddering in his soul.
Silence could have been a frock for anger.
Once a young man, fleeing to Chicago,
he returned still furious for freedom
full of confusing words and the politics of poverty.

To be close by the big river is to be home again.
Back to my only country where the white rose blooms.
Returning from a ghost town, the old loneliness intact.
I have no roots but the ones I drag behind.
I am poor.

Soon, darkness will set in and he will loom in memory
the way new snow drifts in the from the west.
His ghost will float along the river to Montana
where he will sit, the water will flow past
and he will be younger, older than I am or ever will be.



Quotation from Youth by James Wright

Strange
This hatred of factories.
I have never been in one.
Fifty years my father labored in a factory making film.
There is no evidence he ever took a picture.
There is a family portrait
taken by a neighbor I suppose.
My father is looking away from the camera,
his gaze focused somewhere the camera cannot see,
none of us can see.
He could be whittling a root
or on a bridge waiting for the ice to break.

It is ten years since the factory closed,
my father gone.
As I look at the portrait now and try to follow his gaze,
I can see the river running around the locks
through the arches, past the dark bones of factories
out to a casting sea.
He never talked to me about his life in the factory
but sometimes when I turn over late in the night
I hear his voice
whispering to my mother, her whispering back.

Northfield, Minnesota,
a flood warning issued at 3 a.m. comes too late for her.
Caught on the wrong side of the river,
alone, unhappy on high ground
she lays down her book The Sixth Extinction,
its glittering story of glittering skeletons
has become too prophetic in this deluge.
All around, people on high ground
fine tune satellite dishes
to catch the latest pictures
of their neighbors stunned faces
as yet another **** gives way,
one more street goes dark,
another dead dog washes up on the lawn.

As the river reclaims its ancient banks,
renews its title to the land
she goes down to bathe in its soft brown hands.
She can remember the morning.
She can remember the evening.
She can remember her neighbor’s dog barking.
She is too young to remember the dry days
of high spring when birds on scarlet wings
flew low under a terrible blaze of stars.
She is old enough to understand the river’s life,
its single unrelenting purpose – return to the sea;
to understand we cannot live like a river.

Winter, I am walking alone.
The place is bare but for the fence posts.
Gray, splintered wood, smooth texture
when caressed in the right way.
This hard earth meets each stride
with the sting of cold rejection,
a reminder my soles need repair.
Behind that line of ash and cypress
the sun is looking away –
vague light leeches through the leaves,
heat does not penetrate the shadows.
Could there be a blessing –
warmth or a cushion of grass?
The sun casts an empty halo
around an early moon.
The moon too is vague and cold
but it does not look away,
it feels like a blessing;
the darkening sky, the hard stars,
blessing the day into night.