On the themes of Epitaph and Life Cycle
ELEGY FOR AN APRIL MIDNIGHT
In the cut earth that glitters up
the light of pitchfork and spade
in the wind-whipped sheets
of clouds and the smear of red tulips
in the industrious cities of worms:
drunk on camellias, on the smoke
of flagrant weeds under our feet
almost unnoticed whispering
of half-swollen buds – I unearth
your words – that breath whose voice
was cut off. Steps crossed the dark
boundaries, gray curtained gray,
an hour whose name no one
could repeat, however close it came
to the heart. The storm velocities
bore down a mountain of weak
fast-falling light. One thrush calling
far away, not far, close at hand, clear.
BITTEN
So confused by the spiritual turns of the wind
and the light falling in enormous gray patches,
I’d arrange my blood to be open, my wings
to tie themselves like curtains to your windows.
But who could miss the absorbed expression
of clocks wound up to reel the afternoon forward?
Yet there were good days too, that today make me clutch
the pen to my breast and write on the skin of the world
its strangeness. And when the sky walks through the pond’s
green darkness and the fingers of trees lengthen
like embittered saints, I’ll come back to the dawn, its iced
tendrils that in the end dissolve the slow mortar
of the tongue. Though my blood enters like a fire the belly
of another, much remains in the mind’s dark shifting,
where moth-like shadows dart in front of me and
dragonflies strike the surface to drink and not be drowned.
Author Biography
Elizabeth McLagan lives in Portland OR and has a book of poems, In The White Room, just out from CW Books.