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Elegy"
Wind buffs the waterstained stone cupids and shakes
Old rain from the pines’ low branches, small change
Spilling over the graves the years have smashed
With a hammer— forget this, forget that, leave no
Stone unturned. The grass grows high, sweet-smelling,
Many-footed, ever-running. No one tends it. No
One comes....And where am I now?.... Is this a beginning,
A middle, or an end?.... Before I knew you I stood
middle, or an end?.... Before I knew you I stood
In this place. Now I forsake the past as I knew it
To feed you into it. But that is not right. You step
Into it. I find you here, in the shifting grass,
In the late light, as if you had always been here.
Behind you two torn black cedars flame white
Against the darkening fields.... If you turn to me,
Quiet man? If you turn? If I speak softly?
If I say, Take off, take off your glasses.... Let me see
Your sightless eyes?.... I will be beautiful then....
Look, the heart moves as the moths do, scuttering
Like a child’s thoughts above this broken stone
And that. And I lie down. I lie down in the long grass,
Something I am not given to doing, and I feel
The weight of your hand on my belly, and the wind
Parts the grasses, and the distance spills through—
The glassy fields, the black black earth, the pale air
Streaming headlong toward the abbey’s far stones
And streaming back again.... The drowned scent of lilacs
By the abbey, it is a drug. It drives one senseless.
It drives one blind. You can cup the enormous lilac cones
In your hands— ripened, weightless, and taut—
And it is like holding someone’s heart in your hands,
Or holding a cloud of moths. I lift them up, my hands.
Grave man, bend toward me. Lay your face.... here....
Rest....! took the stalks of the dead wisteria
From the glass jar propped against the open grave
And put in the shell-shaped yellow wildflowers
I picked along the road. I cannot name them.
Bread and butter, perhaps. I am not good
With names. But nameless you walked toward me
And I knew you, a swelling in the heart,
A silence in the heart, the wild wind-blown grass
Burning— as the sun falls below the earth—
Brighter than a bed of lilies struck by snow.
— Brigit Pegeen Kelly, The Orchard: Poems (BOA Editions Ltd., 2004)
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