My Hand Upon Your Name

Two Turtle, and the Anniversary of His Death

73 TWO TURTLE, and tHe annIVersary oF HIs deatH ––in memory ofW .B.Yeats I. It was the nearness of our sleep, yours long and mine lessening under the branch, the Holsteins’ satellite cries, and field stones rubbing my spine. I had a will that wouldn’t desert the sky, witnessed glitter falling out of a star nursery that November night outside Sligo. Now— II. I sleep under a tree whose branches come close but still do not touch, and a bee swims through a vision of another dead man who is my brother. The steeple between my eyebrows turns green in the rain the Navajos have been praying for. Clouds pillar over into nothing while an old swan circles the rise of water in the estuary.That is my mother, her Irish eyes needing now to shut the world down. III. Orange laughter flies up from her open book into my face, a pair of hands in cistern light pressing together to form a dove that will blow through my dress at the turn of the century. She’s letting her grasp on things go 74 —newborns wash-up in the pool below the waterfalls each noon. IV. White vulture swoops down, agonies of sun over a desert road, to carry off the snake it spotted for miles away. I’m looking deeper into this eye, your deliberate fallen stars, the other ruined halves of lives we let die bright while still inside. V. There is no strain, no theme leaving the Kiva, they say. I walk through myself as if I was your memory, an Easter with and without names or the deer dance over stones the heart made cry. VI. There are lacewings stuck to my shoes everywhere I go. There was no passing by:A friend rode his gray horse out of the clouds and into the canyon to ask me if he was my father, after all. But the years plash down like pins, and then suddenly, he’s become a younger man determined this time not to fall. He sat up straight and held the reins as if they meant something more. The horse still nervous among the old graves. 75 VII. I covered my husband’s dinner with a linen napkin and your sleep’s wind turned a corner over to warming apples:The room made full under the long pull of the sun’s hoof. I saw a vein of shadow, your wrist as under the midnight kiss-composites of blessing all.A rose holds light, raw hands in the window tree. VIII. Is it time’s stormy gown that I have finally outgrown for loving you? Do you remember the Czechoslovakian man with a handlebar moustache, a dusky demon with mourning cloak wings we might have said, who took us that night like a champion without doubt as my friends and I stumbled, laughing low out of the pub without mirrors, and into his spidery black Fiat? He rubbed and rubbed his happy golden arms all over my neck, struck a match from between his teeth for my cigarette. Remember the two girls in the back seat, one saying, “the darkness of the moon made her want to just let go,” and the other, “urinate like the wolf who is shifting his shape in the bog.” He stopped the sooty blur 76 of night as we ran with our packs, not knowing where the hills or the mind with mud and stones would take us. IX. I never woke again with the cry from out of a black and white face, the cow who ran when I jumped from my sack and saw that I had slept in its field beside your churchyard with the stone visitors look for that reads: “Horseman pass by.” I’m holding my hand upon your name.You’re holding the poppy with the power to unravel time. X. So’ is what the Dine’ say—stars, bright hands, spice in the good far-out place where men to women are born. One clan in the Dream Run groans now, says the last phase of creation was one squash, fat and orange, riding two horns, elated and without sin. TwoTurtle is what they called that day, a gate opened for the blood kindred. This page intentionally left blank. This page intentionally left blank...