Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems, 1965-2003

Spring and Its Flowers

X I have decorated this banner to honor my brother. Our parents did not want his name used publicly. —from an unnamed child’s banner in the AIDS Memorial Quilt. The boatpond, broken off, looks back at the sky. I remember looking at you, X, this way, taking in your red hair, your eyes’ light, and I miss you so. I know, you are you, and real, standing there in the doorway, whether dead or whether living, real.—Then Y said, “Who will remember me three years after I die? What is there for my eye to read then?” The lamb should not have given his wool. He was so small. At the end, X, you were so small. Playing with a stone on your bedspread at the edge of the ocean. Spring and Its Flowers Then, Tell me your fantasies, you said. And I: OK; I’m lying in bed, asleep, a child, and you, you’re sitting in the rocker there, knitting, like a mother bear. And you: Can I be the one in the bed, too? And you in the chair there, knitting? That February you dreamed your old father said, Spring this year and its flowers will cost you eighteen thousand dollars. Waking up we wished we could have lived together in a green and blue walled garden forever . . . the river at wolf 183 We didn’t know we were so close to the world’s mouth, the drunk bear’s ashy thing. The Summer Was Not Long Enough Stanley, my ex, the painter, stepped out of his van. His beard was gone. Loudly, carefully, he started to paint the trees and the ground and the telephone poles grass green. Funny, I was crying after him: not Stan’s upsidedown-ness, my own. My own friends, not written back, not called. Oh our love turned from, and August half over. August’s more than half over; Dove, it’s time for peace. Time to taste the round mountains, the white and green, and the dusk rose of relationship, again, for the first time, it’s time to take off our clothes, and the fortresses around our eyes, to touch our first fingers, you and I, like God, across everything. Still Life, for Matisse Light old leaf spine fish spine bone green under-the184 door in the mountain ...