The Last Parent
The last parent gone–
and afterwards, orphan,
the sun's full glare is on you.
Unshielded by those large figures,
whoever you have become
is found out:
your irreversible sins of omission
the broken veins in your thighs,
your habits of refusal.
All the efforts to go lightly
have carved you:
a face as lined as theirs was.
You step out with short, flatfooted steps.
The ice – how it narrows your eyes. It shines.
Courage
Say a child dies. Yours.
And your second child. And the third.
And then your littlest one. We are not talking
about the end of the world, but yesterday,
in the time of the grandmothers,
my grandmother, for instance, whose children
died of tuberculosis in the old country.
Or it was the Black Plague.
Or influenza, in the 1918 epidemic.
Or children tossed on the tips of bayonets,
run through by swords, whenever,
Genghis Khan, the Ottoman Turks, the Nazis.
Because of the dead children, women cried at weddings,
knowing the young bride's future.
So where was the light in the world?
And tell me, can there be courage
when there are no options?
My grandmother knew only:
you marry, you have children,
after the deaths you keep going.
And of course you grieve, though some say
they would not let themselves care
for their little ones in the earliest years.
But my father, eldest son of her five new children,
was loved like a firstborn. Year after year
she made the choice: to love,
while grieving, each new infant,
knowing how frail its prospects.
That dappling in the world,
the recurring light.
Destination
I arrive at the animals reluctant
to use them
we ourselves should be enough
the stories are about us
as for birds they've always stood for
the unknowable verbs
as for grass grain flowers that shake the earth
with small unstoppable explosions
as for bonsai trees and redwoods
the extremes of butterfly and rock
as for grasshopper and ant
grapes and the fox
all Aesop's fables
those creatures that stand for us
stand also for themselves
as you and I stand also for ourselves
nobody's animals
I have no love poems
When I loved—
a long, long time
ago and still no past—
I had no need
for poems.
I make a poem
not in the way that I
made love, but care-
fully, and in some pain.
