Elegy: The Absences

Elegy: The Absences

Elegy: The Absences

Tree crickets tap tap tap. They are tunneling
their way out of the dark; when they break through,
their dry husks will be planets. Little sheep-bells
clink. The sheep are finding their way down
through clouds, and fence by fence into the distance
dogs bark, clearing ditches, marking farms.
Much that is living here goes into the mouth
of night or issues from it. I sleep, and silence
climbs into my ear, the land blacks out, all
that was delicate and sharp subdued with fog.
The dead are buried in us. We dream them
as they dreamed us and woke and found us
flesh. Their bones rise through us. These are your eyes:
you will see a new world through them. This is your tongue
speaking. These are your hands, even in sleep
alert like animals. Stumbling on
down known paths through blackberry canes I happen
on details that insist. They scratch, they drag
their small hooks, they whiplash, they draw blood.

                                      ***

You balloon above me, a big cloud burning
with breath; a coolness settles on my skin.
Your hands that could manage
things gone wrong, stopped clocks, a generator
with the devil in it, roughly set me right.

You talk, you stroke my brow, I come back into
the house: clean plates on shelves, the simple view
– a world that’s workable.
I’m safe, I’m held. As when you found a greenie’s
thin-shelled, sky-pale egg and brought it to me. Look,
you said. I looked. In the round nest of your hand
a landscape, water, stories, even my own
small life. In your palm,
roughened from work, a cat’s cradle of lines,
leading to where I was, to where I am. 

                                     ***

In a century when it was some men’s fate to be
marshaled into firing squads, and others’
to go to the wall (the meat-eating

angels of those years snapped through the air
like bullets and left wounds that peace could not
grow over; even those like you who lived

at peace had also bled); in a century
when wheat crops passed three times through the same belly
as mud, as mud, a man walked out

of a tale you told and stood knee-deep in ashes
on the moon. Your days so common I can find
no mark of ‘history’. But I see you rub

a sore place on your skull, wondering where
it struck, what day, what hour, and how
you picked up the beginnings of a story we

are seeing, no not the end but say the climax
of. The man goes on out of your mouth and into
silence, hangs on a breath. What happens next? 

                                      ***

You bore my image long enough, the promise
of it, looking clean through the bodies
of women to where I stood beside the river
waiting, pitching stones. No wonder I stand there
still. No wonder I bear the image of you
to the edge of streams in every weather, looking
back through the bodies
of women, strangers, searching for the one
door I must come through. I look back
through it, beyond the wars: a regatta day;
grass, white lace verandas. You are there. You are looking
towards me. The woman is still, turning neither
your way nor mine, she does not know us.
She will.
The river is always the same river.
Stones skip light across it. Generations
of fish, wave upon wave, shoulder upstream. 

                                       ***

You knew about absences. I am learning
slowly how much space they occupy
in any house I move to, any page — the white spaces
no ink flows into, the black ones
no breath flows out of, mouths. My mother lived
for eight years in your absence. Now we make room
for hers. The ghostly bodies we grew out of
are still somewhere within us. We look through them
to what lies ahead. Back behind
is greener than it was for all those deaths.

                                      ***

The house catches its breath. I go downstairs
in the dark: stars at the window, a tap drips
cold. I stoop and drink from a cupped hand,
cradling the sweet water. It is more
than water when I lift it to my lips.

A barefoot child on the cool boards of a house
I left decades ago, I pause and hear
your footfall on the landing. Is that you
son? I dare not answer. If I went and stood
in the dark well looking up, would you be there?