In the Gardens of Life

At Nine the Three of Hearts Turns Out the Houselights

Yeats is dead and Frostand now George Garrettwho told the story

of Robert Frost flyingin the month of JanuaryNineteen thirty-nine,

hearing from the pilotthat Yeats was dead,and assumed, smiling, the role

by succession, first poetof the English language.To which I answered:

"You see the firefliesin the gardenwhen the houselights fail."

Good bourbon gone to wasteand so much else. We fourrocking our rockers

as if the Irish in each onewas turning Rebel Yellto Jameson. Well said.

Catch at those wordsthat make us catch our breaths.Those points of light, brief

constellations . . . Do youbelieve in fairies? Hardly.In ghosts? No knowing.

Haunters and haunted oneswho keep their lights alight,"so arrogantly pure"

they will not let the inkwash over them—or darknesstake all the goodness of the dead.

The Ace of Clubs Wonders

about the four Knightsone of whom formerlywas attached to each suitbefore they were suppressedlike the Order of Knights Templar.

Could it have been those four,dispossessed and disgraced,who murdered Becketset all Europe howlingand made one martyr too many?

Or did they, masterless men,wander like certain samuraito the edges of the islandsbegging food in shame,outlaws of the game?

Cora the Nine of Diamonds

stands waist-high in lavender,her solitude underscored by bees.A doe and a fawn block the road to the bay.

No day in May like any other or anyremembered, and she is ninety, a bluebirthday begun at dawn for one.

Always unguessable, the light in Maine.Her few friends are too frail to be here,her grandchildren appear older

than she ever was in their sharecrop world,"poor dears, busy as bees." She inhabitsan idle child's garden, every breath lavender.