Views from Heaven’s Porches

The Way Water Does

We walk England without saying a word, the way even the long unmarried do.

Trees meet overhead in a vaguely Gothic arch, so thickly green the shade needs a flying buttress

to keep it from collapsing on us. O leafy vaults of High Perpendicular!

O waning of the Middle Ages! Suddenly it’s thirty years—no, more—since we met.

Let’s stand on the fake Bridge of Sighs. Over the sleepy Cam it bends, not quite at home,

as if the arch, raising weighty skirts above the drag and stench of history,

should remember a side canal in Venice— but it can’t. I do. In that least real of cities,

behind the decorated cake of the Doge’s Palace, crossing the real Bridge of Sighs,

I found nothing to sigh over. You know my skin the way water does. Taking its time,

rain has licked the stone faces of Cambridge, whether gargoyle or angel, back into lumps of clunch.

Kissed in public by the inconstant sun, the faceless stones of England blush.

At Summer’s End, Persephone

parted the overgrown hedge. There stood the tree she remembered— still on its last limbs and still “self-pruning,” as the tree-surgeon called it— still the largest sweet gum in the underworld.

From the dogwood, berries dripped, bright as blood. A frog called out for company. The owl that hunted it rowed the deepening dark with muffled wing. Clinging to the front door of the house,

a moth tried to disguise itself as wood. How had the gecko guarding the porch light missed a last mouthful of dust? Under its pale otherworldly skin, throbbed a blue semiprecious stone.

In ancient gowns the months Persephone had lost to the upper world leaned down from heaven’s porches. There on her own porch, in the rocking chair where no one ever rocked,

sat the dead weight of September, the chair ever so faintly ashudder.