The Eagle’s Mile

Poem: through a French poet, Roland Bouheret, and my running father

Poem through a French poet, Roland Bouheret, and my running father For having left the birds that left me Better streaks on my eyes than they can make On any sky alive: for having broken loose new stars By opening to the storm a deaf window At the moment the summer park closed: for having rubbed out, From cliffs not dangerous enough, or cold enough For you, the name of the dead, I hear the sound of fresh steps seeding toward me, Steps I could take. Gene, Dead in the full of July Ten years ago, I have learned all the tracks Of the stars of that month: they give me more body-authority Than a beast-birth in straw. Believe me I have kept The old river that ran like something from a crock, Through the cow-battered weeds: that runs over us As baptismal water always; I believe I could be walking there Like high valleys crossing, In the long laconic open-striding fullness Of your muscular death. In whole air your form Takes up with me best, giving more than it could In the hospital's mirror-blanked room Where you leaned toward the grim parks under you Before they closed, and out of the rattling rails 61 Of your cocked bed, talked about mowing, nothing But mowing, of all weird, unearthly Earthly things: like a shower of grassblades Talked, tilted and talked, and shivered, down past you, the gaunt Traffic-islands into green; from that time on, I saw them As blocked fields, part of elsewhere. But we are advancing By steps that grew back to my door, And if I set your long name in the wind And it comes back spelling out The name of a far port-of-call, the place we never got to, That is all right. And yet, with the ashy river Running like a soul where I'm headed, Even with the names of harbors that swarmed all over me When I hit the open, when I paced myself exactly With the current—these and the birds, the old cows, Have stubborned here stalled no matter how I increase My leg-beat, or stretch and find myself Calling out in mid-stride. You are motionless, you are in the middle Of elsewhere, breathing the herd-breath Of the dead—singled and in-line breathing Among so many—looking in the same direction As the rest of them, your long legs covered with burrs And bent weeds, splinters of grassblades: Squared-off, power-bodied, pollen-lidded You are: green-legged, but nailed there. 62 ...