3 poems reprinted from After the Reunion (University of Arkansas Press, 1994) with permission of the author:
Trees in the Night
With grief and finally helpless we had come to bury
the last of our love beneath the immense, swaying pines.
Months they had surrounded our sleep and our waking.
Months we had listened to their rumors of storm or of clam
so it seemed only right to grieve with them one final time—
such human grief to think they would care if they could.
There was nothing to say or so much—blame and reprisal—
it couldn’t be spoken. Months we had loved
the gold finches shooting like arrows of sunlight
through branches fifty, sixty feet high. How many trees?
We stood in cool patches quiet with needles and ferns.
Such a grief—solitary, dark—still thinking of itself in the plural.
Faith
It was
The boy cousins brought us a tray—soup and cheese,
warm soda, and a soft cloth and candy for her fever.
They wouldn’t come in, the tray weighing between them.
They stood like woodwork inside the door frame.
By afternoon theold procession—silence at the lip
of a dozen night travelers tired and grieving, one
by one, or pairs floating to the bed and back
with a touching of hands like humming,
and the one we gathered for slipping farther
for all the good we could do. She lay in her shadow.
She looked to no one. Her daylilies bobbed wide
open out in the wild, blue sun and the same bee
kept nosing her window to reach them.
Dusk: even the boys were back watching it try.
Mercy
Small flames afloat in a blue duskfall, beneath trees
anonymous and hooded, the solemn trees—by ones
and twos and threes we go down to the water’s level edge
with our candles cupped and melted onto little pie-tins
to set our newest loss free. Everyone is here.
Everyone is wholly quiet in the river’s hush and appropriate dark.
The tenuous fires slip from our palms and seem to settle
in the stilling water, but then float, ever so slowly,
in a loose string like a necklace’s pearls spilled,
down the river barely as wide as a dusty road.
No one is singing, and no one leaves—we stand back
beneath the grieving trees on both banks, bowed but watching,
as our tiny boats pass like a long history of moons
reflected, or like notes in an elder’s hymn, or like us,
death after death, around the far, awakening bend.