Dark Wild Realm Read Free

from towers, in trees, where they
convene like ushers on church steps.
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Heads sculpted to fit cane handles, claws
to dibble seed, to sort out the warp of the snow
from the woof, unwind the gray bobbins of brain.
assiduous as cats as they clean, wing scouring
wing, until the head polished like a gem
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gleams, and the ears no more than lacy holes
are sieves for passing air or molecules of gas.
These birds, who wear the face of what will last,
congregating but not crowding, incurious
and almost patient with their dead.

IN MAY
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In May the paths into the dunes
are roped off from foot traffic
because the birds amass to breed.
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You can watch them through binoculars
from the edge of a parking lot,
white invisible deltas that drop
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and glint, cataractous floaters
against the sun, rising from the sea
or fluttering midday from nests
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spiked inside the broken clumps
of compass grass. Or on a plaque
read about a lighthouse stretched
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like bones
beneath the waves.
When Heraclitus observed,
"You can't step into the same river twice,"
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did he mean you couldn't trust
experience or thought to illustrate
how "nature loves to hide" beneath
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its own swift surface? Did he mean
there's pleasure in deception,
not despair, delight when we recognize
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a tern's or plover's flash and glitter,
silhouettes that navigate thermal rivers,
declare themselves like scraps of paper,
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then disappear?

SHELLEY'S GUITAR
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How much more beautiful it is
because it's Shelley's guitar—
a coffin of trapped song
in a body like a grave.
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Because it's Shelley's guitar
it's been put on display,
a case within a case,
a wooden hand inside a velvet glove,
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and nearby, the torn copy of
Adonais

that held his heart for thirty years.
Next to it, other incomparable relics:
his baby rattle, a watch, the plate
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off which he ate the beautiful
raisins of his diet. Everything
encased, preserved, though
the heart now is only a stain, a watermark
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on pages his widow used to save it.
Never mind the guitar was given to his friend
Jane, as if it were the heart
unauctioned, a neck
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with tuning pegs, gut strings, arabesque
filigree. And never mind the guitar
was meant to be a pedal harp
he couldn't afford. "Take this slave
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of music," the poem says,"for the sake
of him who is the slave of thee."
Whose heart is it but Shelley's?
Whose grave, whose book, whose glove and raisins?
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All those things that have been given
either by "action or by suffering,"
left behind, collected, to prove
the dead have substance.

BARDO
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Dangerously frail is what his hand was like
when he showed up at our house,
three or four days after his death,
and stood at the foot of our bed.
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Though we had expected him to appear
in some form, it was odd, the clarity
and precise decrepitude of his condition,
and how his hand, frail as it was,
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lifted me from behind my head, up from the pillow,
so that no longer could I claim it was a dream,
nor deny that what your father wanted,
even with you sleeping next to me,
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was to kiss me on the lips.
There was no refusing his anointing me
with what I was meant to bear of him
from where he was, present in the world,
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a document loose from the archives
of form—not spectral, not corporeal—
in transit, though not between lives or bodies:
those lips on mine, then mine on yours.

THE NEXT NIGHT
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I found my way back
by grief scent and smoke
to the daughter's voice
from the father's mouth.
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This time you asked
that I step outside my body,
though not far enough to fall
into the abyss of night
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or near the flames
that ringed the bed.
I couldn't say "Go away,"
because the dead can hear,
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and they, as you remind, float
above us, not everywhere,
but here and there, following
their own preoccupations.
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Besides, I loved your skirt
of burning tongues,
the sleeveless blouse that fit you
as it fit the armless mannequins.
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I loved all the