A stub of a red pencil in your hand.
A Georgia O’Keefe landscape rising beyond
The carcass of black larkspur,
Beyond the Milky Way where
The lights of galaxies are strung out over a dipper of gin
With a large sun and the rotund
Fuchsia moon. Her closet is empty, except for the
manuscript
With your signature. She has left you!
Where was it in the field
That you threw the telephone:
After moving away
From the farmhouse, you found it again when
Returning for the lost cat-
As you walked through the low chinaberries calling
Her name you found the white horn
Of the telephone. You are alone calling to the frozen
Countryside of New Jersey.
She sleeps
In the yellow wicks of the meadow:
You are calling the mopsy cat back
From the ditch, but Dexedrine presses a pencil
Up against your eyebrow and temple. And
You’ve forgotten— what was it?
Out there in the field calling
Across the cold night air, drinking from the gold flask,
Again tucking that stub of a pencil
Back behind your ear. You read, this morning,
In the crisp pica lettering of the old Remington,
How boatmen navigated the winter shallows of the Seine
Guided by a lamp burning all night
In a narrow window in Flaubert’s study;
And all of a sudden, under the severe stars of this
hemisphere,
You remembered everyone who was a friend.
But why your hand is locked on a red pencil, again,
At the bottom of a wintry meadow, in New Jersey,
Is the mystery rising behind you on the wind …
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