Archive for April, 2010

April 27, 2010

To the Men Asleep Under the Dogwood, 1958

They do not rest, peaceful as fallen petals
backs pressed against hillocks of new grass
overcoats smelling of lawn onions, hooch,
the quarter for a bath they did not have.
They do not speak companionably, men
on an outing, chums, passing their stories.
They close their eyes against the limbs, the sky,
the landlady – her key, her lock, her rules.
She’s a minotaur tugging the curtain
with her hoof, her nightgown ripped by her horns.

Limbs catch on the insides of their eyelids;
the cross-hatch becomes the river Elbe
on a mortarman’s much-folded field map;
or slim brown legs tangled in sheets, not his;
or the cracks in the mirror’s silvering
as it hung above the bar where time ran out.

The men rise up from the earth, now specters
from tales told by my elderly neighbor.
Their failures cling to me like the fallen
petals I’ll find buried in my knotted hair
when I wake in the early morning hours,
asleep in my nightgown, feet bare, chilled,
the house key against my palm, my failures
forming shapes in the tangled weave of limbs.