It may have come here on the ships playing
music in the harbor, or it was always here, a winged
jewel, but in the past was kept still by the cold
of a winter that no longer comes.
There is an owl living in the firs behind us, but he is white,
meant to be mistaken for snow burdening a bough.
They say he is the only owl remaining. I hear him at night
listening for the last of the mice and asking who of no other owl.
A BRIDGE
Behind us a sea-cliff, landfall, ahead the wind,
tar-smoke, the sea, a carrick.
We sway on a bridge between them
above a great shattering. We have left
the verge, our certainty, and walk across
a chasm to the cries of cormorants, fulmars,
the wings of mute swans singing in flight.
Below us bladder wrack, sea froth, and dulse,
sea against rocks in heave and salt, and between
bridge and sea an abyss we cross, as behind us
the headland recedes—cottages and boats, clouds and sheep,
a piping of oystercatchers dying out, and the callings
of kittiwakes preparing to leave their nesting ground.
The bridge rises and falls with our steps, moving in wind
so we must hold fast the ropes
once made of hides and the hair of cows’ tails
hoisted over the silvering salmon as they leapt
into bag nets too heavy to lift, hauled
across this very bridge that rings in wind
like ship’s rigging, volary of rock pipits,
bazaar of guillemots, colony of puffins,
and in the blackest water below us ghosts
of salmon, empty nets, and on the carrick
ruins of boats, nets, buoys, and a fisherman’s bothy.
We have only to keep walking for the bridge to go on.
The carrick is a foothold in the distance, a stone in time.
When we reach it, not only may the salmon return
but you will be alive again, wake me when we reach the carrick.
THE END OF SOMETHING
That summer we lived in the hills near San Gersolè,
where a saint sleeps holding poppies in a glass coffret,
about to unbutton what would have been her wedding dress.
Other than this not much is known about the saint.
This is the church of a thousand years: vineyards,
hummingbirds, swifts, chicory, swallows, bindweed,
and the ringing of bells for liturgy, births, and deaths,
with a flock of bells to tell the village of war or its end.
Mornings we wake to light upon stone, much as the sisters
who lived here in the fourteenth century came from sleep,
swallows foraging from an eternity of eaves.
On the last day, we have our lunch of figs under the lindens.
The lemons are nearly ripe, hanging like ornaments from a lemon branch.
This isn’t our last day, she says. Tomorrow is our last day.
As proof, she offers time singing in the darkness of time.
We are trying to climb to the ruins when my heart gives way.
When my heart gives way in the poppy field I have to turn back.
Before turning back, I press a few poppies in a book.
Before turning back, I take a photograph of no one
standing in a poppy field. I am myself standing.
I ask my mother, thousands of miles away, to help me back.
EARLY LIFE
In Le Détroit du Lac Érié, five years after the end of war, I was born.
My father’s naval uniform hung among our coats and his white cap
flung into the sea at war’s end still then floated on the waves there.
My father built a house for us, working in the dark after his factory shift.
One night a long-buried woman appeared, all fog and bones, passing
through a wall he’d yet to finish. Later we hung a mirror there
and from time to time the fog woman stood behind the mirror looking out.
Beneath a nearby house, there was a cellar where escaping slaves once were hidden.
An underground railroad carried them through a tunnel beneath the fields.
In the mornings the fields hummed their readiness.
In the orchard, apples and apricots appeared in the trees, and in the garden
sudden red cabbage, blue-leaved lilies, endive, and wandering mint.
Over the field crawled squash vine and blossom until a row of berry
canes stood in a cloud of bees, and lettuces opened in watery light.
When Anna was with us, pillows of bread rose in bowls and soup
boiled the windows blind. Anna was from the old country. This was the new one.
Many sentences began with Be quiet now, in voices like birches in snow.
They began their stories when the war ended. Never when the war began.
TAPESTRY
There is no album for these, no white script on black
paper, no dates stamped in a border, no sleeve, no fire,
no one has written on the back from left to right.
Your hair has not yet fallen out nor grown back—
girl walking toward you out of childhood
not yet herself, having not yet learned to recite
before others, and who would never wish to stand
on a lighted proscenium, even in a darkened house,
but would rather dig a hole in a field and cover herself
with barn wood, earth, and hay, to be as quiet as plums turning.
There is no calendar, no month, no locket, but your name
is called and called in the early storm. No one finds