The Gravel of Mortality

Figures and Filigrees

Early July, yet leaves are floating on the pool by insects ravaged into lacy forms, though traceries of veins retain the shape of each leaf. I put them on white sheets and study their embroidery: some have been carved to golden filigree, some sieved to let the light shine through, or dried they have become the gauzy whisperings of leaves, a rustling, and antiqued to coral netting or to ochre weave, a lattice of transparencies that recall

delicate carvings my grandfather had cut on folded papers that we found in books— silhouettes of peacocks, pelicans, and unicorns leaping from a center stalk of flowers sprung in paradise before the fall. Did he use razor blades or were they cut so fine with a sharp knife—a respite from the wisdom found in texts that we inherited—or did he carve those balanced scenes to flee the mercantile arithmetic of dreary days?

I never asked my father about him, and now it is too late. My sister, long ago, as little girl visited that distant place. He was a man of some renown who took her visiting in horse-drawn carriages. My sister weaves frail webbings as she tells the tale. I’ve watched her, so much older, waste away. Since her fall she’s wilted, lost her weight, become a cribbled echo of all former certainties.

I place her on a sheet of memory. Upon the page, reflected in a lighter form, she is become a macrame.

Persephone’s Return

Daughter, I put you down in autumn into deep earth where you became the later son who took your eyes, a brazen blue and your white hair so blond it lost all color in bright sun.

Strange, when I thought of you returned and grown, I saw you in a doctor’s white that he now wears as though you could not make it back in your own shape but had to gather

limb by bone, four winters, your return in different, yet remembered form, dragging the gravel of mortality into his lusty life, making him an instrument against your brevity

as I still live, from spring to spring awaiting your return with each new leaf your coming as each bloodroot grows from heart of earth its bleeding stalk holding white blossom out.