Indian Summer
My fear-God,
ancient cousins shared the same
house sixty
years, a cameo clan
of cat’s-pee
sofas, mid-sentence naps, surname
a loot
recovered when the redskins ran
to twilight
generations and the land
was staked
for farms. The tom defied Chopin,
sank
stretching in the belly of the grand
piano.
Shredded cushions testified
to years of
lazy claws restyling hand-
embroidered
patterns. Portrait oils preside
there still,
the features fixed in varnish matt
the centuries
of hearth fires craze. The fried
glaze buckles
to the grate, a butterfat
of branded
looks consumed as caveat.
*
That August,
I walked along the clatter
of
cornstalks, kicking through the furrow rows
for flints. I
stopped, stooped within the tatter
of river
meadow ploughed to suit the crows,
examining my
finds: the arrow tips
translucent—
those serrated edges roes
felt ripping
pelt and heart wall— hand-tooled chips
I polished,
held to light recalling rites
lost
centuries. There is no god equips
us for
impermanence. Our lives are kites
of clouds the
wind drives out along the air
around us,
template for the arrows’ flights.
We live to
live again, life foursquare
a trophy of
the rituals we share.
*
The
switchback trail was dry stone walls and pines.
I climbed
into the day to rest there by
the boundary.
The sunken-earth designs
of limestone
evidenced a time awry.
Each breach
disproved a mended wilderness,
the rock
course toppled to the alibi
of iron-bar
roots and soil-shift. The recess
eroded in the
scree was Shawnee, grave
goods woven
to a primitive finesse
of spirit
dyes’ root-reds, each symbol wave
a colour
breaking bright in paradise.
The trace was
ashen to the touch, the brave
a huddled
remnant called to other skies
as life
within each echoed life replies.
*
The gravel
road along the hillside grows
before me,
winding in on drifting dust
among the
graves. Abbreviated prose
confirms the
terminus of marble flushed
in sunlit
pinks. My own name, too, appears,
anticipating
resurrection: Trust
in Me,
absolving life’s delinquent years.
My hand’s
print on the blush of stone is all
prediction
warrants, pending volunteers.
The plastic
roses decorate this squall
of dated
lives. Their bloom retains a sense
of seasons in
a trance, and cannot fall,
or fail to
function in a future tense
reserved to
reconcile the faintest scents.
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