You fostered them from purblind whelps
At their dam’s teats, and you have come
To know the music of their yelps:
High-strung Anthee, the brindled bitch,
The blue-tick coated Philomel,
And freckled Chloe, who would fetch
A pretty price if you would sell -
All fleet of foot, and swift to scent,
Inexorable once on the track,
Like angry words you might have meant,
But do not mean, and can’t take back.
There was a time when you would brag
How they would bay and rend apart
The hopeless belling from a stag.
You falter now for the foundered hart.
Desires you nursed of a winter night -
Did you know then why you bred them -
Whose needling milk-teeth used to bite
The master’s hand that leashed and fed them?
* * *
The blackbird sings at
the frontier of his music.
The branch where he sat
marks the brink of doubt,
is the outpost of his realm,
edge from which to rout
encroachers with trills
and melismatic runs sur -
passing earthbound skills.
It sounds like ardor,
it sounds like joy. We are glad
here at the border
where he signs the air
with his invisible staves,
“Trespassers beware” -
Song as survival -
a kind of pure music which
we cannot rival.
* * *
So long I have been carrying myself
Carefully, carefully, like a small child
With too much water in a real glass
Clasped in two hands, across a space as vast
As living rooms, while gazes watch the waves
That start to rile the little inland sea
And slap against its cliffs’ transparency,
Revise and meet, double their amplitude,
Harmonizing doubt from many ifs.
Distant frowns like clouds begin to brood.
Soon there is overbrimming. Soon the child
Looks up to find a face to match the scolding,
And just as he does, the vessel he was holding
Is almost set down safely on the bookshelf.
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