Stories Old and New

Stories Old and New

On Storey's Way

This is the hour an owl would head home to sleep
through the dawn chorus that followed,

blackbird and thrush
singing their tiny hearts out
philosophically, Teach me! Teach me

I see a tree!
What is a tree? Why
is there no brown light like me?

But first a cry broke
in two, cut off by a call.
The door of dream drew back

from a story
with nowhere to start.
It started—think back a breath—

with a screech
tearing day from dark.
A field mouse taken by an owl?

Nailed to the wall
of the garden for its own protection,
a rose laid open a blood-purple blossom.

II

Down Storey's Way I walked,
out of my old life,
into the cemetery.

At the tomb of Wittgenstein I stood:
a slab with his name and dates
bore no other words,

but someone had laid a pine cone
and a penny there, on one
of the few graves

not overgrown. Grief was abandoned
to its own devices but,
over the wall,

green wood burned near Storey's End.
To this, his doctor's house,
he came to die;

from the upper room might he have seen
this cemetery tree,
and heard
a blackbird phrase and rephrase
a last treatise on color,
the color of smoke?

If a ghost appeared, it could glow,
but if it looked gray,
how would we paint it?

The Giant Octopus of Puget Sound

That evening, the talk was all of sex—
not why her husband wasn't home,
which was never mentioned—

but how the old Pole, her guest of honor,
just back from Seattle, had seen
the giant octopus mate.

You ordered specimens like a meal,
he said. You waited
the days it took

the divers to return from the Sound.
At last your glass tank cleared,
you still waiting to see

the world's longest spermatophore
leave one of his tentacles
and enter hers. Slowly,

a chair was brought for the professor
of reproduction (retired).
I forgot to ask

if ink came before sex—how much I forgot.
Of the higher animals present
that most English of evenings,

those not dead now are divorced.
Those still together—
you and I—

read each other like old books,
the pages best left uncut.
Spilled ink, spilled ink!

To a Green Woodpecker

Bird, you're far too bright
     to be believed,
     let alone British.
Red crown, black mustache,
     green back,
     yellow rump—
don't I know you from a book,
     you fashion plate?
     Edwardian dandy,
self-taught scholar of male plumage,
     twelve-inch body
     just a footnote
to the sticky six-inch tongue—
     out of old woods
     on the new edge
of Cambridge you venture to feed.
     On college lawn—
     aren't you the soul
of Frazer, once of Trinity Great Court,
     now of the graveyard
     town edges toward?
For doesn't the soul pass into a bird,
     just as he noted
     the Malays believed?
For, to a bough that catches fire
     in the late sun,
     you lift, startled aloft—
I have come upon his grave.
     The gates of hell
     have rusted open.
The river to the underworld is just gravel,
     the ferryman gone,
     a golden bough
no longer gold enough to take you
     down to the dead,
     then light your way back.

The Dollhouses of the Dead

To see the past better,
you had to climb a little ladder,
the Dutch dollhouse was so tall.
In the attic of the seventeenth century,

nothing dared be out of order;
four maids saw to that, the lady of the house
left standing by her bed, empty-handed,
dressed in gold silk. She wouldn't meet

the mirror's gaze. She couldn't be made to sit.
In the nursery next door, a tiny back was turned:
a child waiting to be fed, not by her mother
but by a nurse hidden in shadow.

Or was she...