For Claude Fredericks
My mother’s lamp once out,
I press a different switch:
A field within the dim
White screen ignites,
Vibrating to the rapt
Mechanical racket
Of a real noon field’s
Crickets and gnats.
And to its candid heart
I move with heart ajar,
With eyes that smart less
From pollen or heat
Than from the buried day
Now rising like a moon,
Shining, unwinding
Its taut white sheet.
Two or three bugs that lit
Earlier upon the blank
Sheen, all peaceable
Insensibility, drowse
As she and I can not
Under the risen flood
Of thirty years ago
A tree, a house
We had then, a late sun,
A door from which the first
Figures jerky and bright
As lightning bugs
From lanterns issue, soon
To be taken for stars,
For fates. With knowing smiles
And graceful shrugs
My mother and two aunts
Loom on the screen. Their plucked
Brows pucker, their arms encircle
One another.
Their ashen lips move.
From the love seat’s gloom
A quiet chuckle escapes
My white-haired mother
To see in that final light
A man’s shadow mount
Her dress. She is advancing
Now, sisterless
But followed by a fair
Child, or fury-myself
At four, in tears. I strike
Her with my fist,
She kneels down, the man’s
Shadow covers us both.
Her voice behind me says
It’s all too fast. I turn
Dials, the film jams
And now, at one hot glare
From our old machine,
The picture burns.
Puzzled, we watch ourselves
Turn red and brown, gone up
In a puff of smoke now coiling
Down fierce beams.
I switch them off. A silence.
Your father, she remarks,
Took those pictures; later
Says pleasant dreams,
Rises and goes. Alone
I gradually dim and cool.
Night scatters me with green
Rustlings, thin cries.
Out there between the pines
Have begun shining deeds,
Some low, inconstant
(These are fireflies),
Others as in high wind
Aflicker, but staying lit,
Their moment telling us
From far ago
That the lived life is never
Lightly undone. How much
Keeps bleaching into scenes
From that life!-no
Flush, no focus and when
Alone in dream, with starlit
Crown and cross, the selves
That might prevail
Ride forth, it will be toward
An ambush of backlash and fumes
Whose dragon gulps us down
Like his own tail.
We wake to what we were.
Father already fading-
Who focused your life long
Through little frames,
Whose microscope, now deep
In purple velvet, first
Showed me the skulls of flies,
The fur, the flames
Etching the jaws-father,
We shrink to our own size.
Each daybreak, back of us,
Fields wail and shimmer.
To go out is to fall
Into old toils, cool web
And stinging song new-hatched
Each day, all summer.
A minute galaxy
About my head will easily
Needle me back. Pronouncing
The day’s first Damn,
I start to run then, small,
Inane, like them, but breathing
In and out the sun
And air I am.
The son and heir! In the dark
It makes me catch my breath.
Listen: upstairs, the faintest
Slither and hiss
Of hers hints what unwinds
In that vast space the dreamer
Hollows out all night long
Against the abyss
Of night. Immensely still
The heavens glisten. One broad
Path of vague stars is floating
Off, a shed skin
Of all whose fine cold eyes
First told us, locked in ours:
You are the hero without name
Or origin.
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