Hunter, and: End of the Semester Reverie, and: Winter Morning, and: Forgetting To Call My Mother

Hunter

I was reading in my office and
there she stood, my student,
metal shooting through her lip
and eyebrow like voltage,
her bruise-colored pants and tee-shirt
tight as a doctor's glove,

finally talking, who never talked
in class. I love poems, she said
these words shyly. But you must hate them.
You round them up.
You torture them to make them confess.
You kill them.

Her eyes darting around, she argued
for each reader making her own meaning.
She argued for freedom.

I admit, I'd thought our class was going well,
I imagined my students in their rooms
pursuing poems like happy beagles,
and sometimes settling together
with the wild tranquility
of swans onto a pond.

But I thanked her for coming
and I said - I realize now
perhaps with too much confidence -
I'm for working it out
together. I'm for a language
we have to share.

She gazed at me. She was lost,
a fawn who'd strayed into a slaughterhouse.
She pulled a sleeve across her eyes
and said, The book is an open field.
Deer may graze all day,
but when hunters come,
the deer have to go home.

Oh, my child!

End of the Semester Reverie

It's black-eyed Susans I love. That's what came to me
this morning. And I love the worst about them,
how they are spendthrift and obvious,

how they go nowhere. I wanted to devote my life
to their shadows, kneeling in the grass, to understand
their significance in light of everything, the curvature

of the earth and the taste of wild strawberries.
I wanted to expand time, to set up housekeeping
in some endless meditation. But things happen.

A student stopped by. I should have sung off key.
I should have mentioned that I'd switched
my field from literature to flowers.

Instead, I opened the door and took her paper.
Afterward, endings appeared everywhere.
The last I saw of her was tanned bare feet

walking down the road into the sky.
Above her, cumulus clouds were agreeing
to go wherever the wind sent them.

I sat on the bottom step of the horizon all afternoon
filled with hope and terror, waiting for the sky
to make the first move, waiting

for the Anything At All which might come next.

Winter Morning

On a morning like this when I awake
and the air sings with cold,
and the sky is sullen with the promise
of undelivered snow, I begin to think

of all the ideas which should never work.
Who bent bailing wire to make the first paper clip?
Who first milked the irritable goat
to make that elegant cheese? And what about

the contraption called the human heart,
that rugged sled we pack higher with grief
against the drag of mounting snow?
I'm thinking of last night's call from another friend

with cancer. The distances. The losses,
which make love the most terrible investment.
And yet, we keep inventing love between us.
I can almost feel my chest strain

against the snow as I swing
my feet over the edge of the bed
to pick up the heavy tarps
labeled Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday.

Forgetting To Call My Mother

Suppose you had remembered? By now
she'd have forgotten your call anyway.
My son's words land like a firebomb
in the old house of love.
I give him a tongue-lashing. His
grandmother's courage. His grandmother's
kindness. She is a mother I can tell
anything, I say

except my grief that she is
crumbling like a Cubist painting,
that her memory is smashing
like a rowboat on the gray rocks,

that these days she thinks
earnestly as a good kindergartner
about picking up her life by its handles,
to carry it out of this world.

He's sorry, he says. He brings
his violin and...