After the blade dropped, and the eyelids twitched,
the spasms tugging at the lips went calm,
and when I called out to the head, “Languille!”
the eyelids lifted up, this time, I swear,
in a distinctly normal movement, slow,
as if awakening, or torn from thought.
With pupils focusing themselves, the eyes
looked sharp, not like a dying man’s, not vague,
and when the lids went shut, I called again,
“Languille!” and again, without a twitch,
they lifted, and the eyes looked into mine.
To the Water Bear
Kleiner Wasserbär, observed by Pastor Johann Goeze, Quedlinburg, December 10, 1772
Jesus in his little boat said to the crowd
on the bank at Galilee
that the mustard seed, the smallest of all seeds,
is to the full-grown tree
as our mere inkling of the kingdom of heaven is
to the kingdom itself.
Maybe the mustard seed is not the smallest
of all seeds and does not really grow
into a tree. The point was not to measure
seeds, or where we go after we die. The point
was reckoning beyond measure.
You, of course, were small,
much smaller than the mustard seed.
Yet to the German pastor who first saw you
move as if in slow-mo underwater,
under the microscope, you looked
enormous, eight stout legs, he called them feet,
with claws like those of a brown bear:
water bear, he called you…little water bear.
Your mouth was something else,
a nozzle for a telescoping vacuum
set with teeth. It struck, and drew the prey
back onto the twin blades inside for the kill.
Gentlemen in those days used
the hunting rifle, which was the latest thing,
to slaughter every bear in every patch of woods
in their whole country, so that the first
brown bear at large in Germany
since Bismarck came of age was famous
just ten years ago. Bruno,
they called him. From the Italian Alps
he walked for weeks through Austria
into the borderland where Germans shot
their last wild bear in eighteen thirty-five.
He celebrated this return by killing
thirty sheep, assorted goats, chickens,
rabbits, and one little girl’s pet guinea pig,
which he finished chewing
on the front stoop of the Polizei.
Tourists at the local inns, grown fearful
that he might kill some of them, soon
had him shot, stuffed, and set up on display
nearby in their Museum of Mankind and Nature.
Living, you would not have recognized
your likeness in the body of your cousin
Bruno. You lacked optics in your eye spots
and your brain had too few cells. In death,
however, limitations of the living fall away,
or that, at least, would seem to be the premise
of my speaking to you in this poem.
You water bears, unlike your cousins,
thrive in Germany, and everywhere,
from lichens on Antarctic mountainsides
and moss along the Nile down
into the silt bed of the Coral Sea.
You can withstand extremes of heat
and cold. Irradiated, poisoned,
under crushing depths of pressure, or sent
floating into the void of outer space, you live.
Though dried-out, crumpled in a heap like duck cloth,
still, when watered, you can twitch, and come to life.
Your species has survived five hundred million years.
Just after the German, an Italian cleric
with a microscope gave you the name
from Latin tardigrade, slow stepper,
like what Beowulf calls the monster
Grendel: mearcstapa, boundary
stepper. That’s you too. It’s Bruno,
me, and every living thing, all teetering
along the edge. And look! I like the way
you move out here. To my mind, you
surpass the kingdom of heaven: you exist.
The Nationality of Neptune
The planet seafaring people call
Poseidon in the Cyclades,
speakers of one local tongue
in Veracruz call Tlaloc,
after their god of bodies
of water, storms, fertility,
and of the realm of the dead.
To delight Tlaloc Aztecs
used to dress the children
of captives and of the chosen
nobles in colorful paper smocks,
with feathers and shells.
On ceremonial mountaintops
and in caves, high priests
with obsidian knife blades
opened the children to remove
their living hearts. Their screams
and tears, some said, brought down
the blessing of rain. Others
chosen of that god they buried
with foreheads painted blue and seeds
placed on their faces. The planet
Tlaloc is not visible to the naked eye.
The Arctic Vortex at Snooks Pond, 2014
The warmest groundwater seeping into the marsh
before it froze for the first time smoked, and ice flowers
formed in the smoke. Ice petals radiated from low twigs.
Ice feathers hung from the willow trunk reflected.
Spurs took shape on the black sheen just now frozen.
Farther out on the pond, in the deep snow, powder
sifted into cracks where the old ice was contracting
with a chirp like sonar. Cracks in the snow gaped, wide
as an old man’s knuckle, crisscross, so that the pond
was a white mosaic, each tile big as a dance floor.
Tracks from a fox, and from deer and rabbits, marked
the dance steps. A man at the sight of the cracked ice,
though he knew better, felt as if he might fall through.
But the clear ice under the cracks held. It was like him.
Apologies to the Dead
1. To Ruth Stein Blum
1866–1929
Passenger pigeons came
rivering endlessly
into your childhood,
and when you were grown
the last one, Martha,
lived on display
at the Cincinnati Zoo.
She was brown and buff
and dull gray, only her eyes
bright orange, each
with a pale blue ring.
2. To Mary DeFrance
1848–1902
The census before the War has you, age fifteen,
living with a physician, thirty-five. At Shiloh
he was a surgeon with the Fourth Infantry
from Louisiana. The Union advanced,
and you fled home for Vicksburg
where the Fourth Infantry fought again.
When the smell of the rotting dead
and screams from the cracked throats
of the
wounded forced both sides
to call a three-hour truce, boys
about to kill each other talked
and traded in a calm between-time
while they tended their friends.
You must have been waiting then
in one of the dirt caves under the bluff,
where people went with carpets, tables,
chairs, and beds, to weather the shelling
from Admiral Porter’s boats. Your new
husband, George Fontaine, was one of the boys
who surrendered. Later, the two of you opened
a dry-goods store in Floyd. Near there
the surgeon, who must have been your father,
murdered an immigrant in cold blood.
3. To Dr. Walter L. DeFrance
1822–?
When the Lord God bird still nested in the swamp,
at three in the afternoon, there was a warm rain.
It was Monday, the first of July, eighteen
sixty-seven. A knock came at the front door.
Herman Stein, my great-great-grandfather,
answered, and you, whose name was never
mentioned in this story, witnessed by his wife
and three small children, drew a pistol…
you, as a gentleman, having taken offense
when billed for your delinquent debt by a Jew.
My father, Kenneth, told me the story told him
by his grandmother, Ruth, who was there
as a toddler when her father died. You,
she said, having shot him in cold blood, went
unpunished, never charged with a crime.
Lately, however, I find that you did not
shoot my kinsman in cold blood.
Newspapers report: it was a stabbing.
The Times-Picayune includes with other
news from the region one short paragraph
on the murder. This comes after a farmer’s
complaint that steady rains have made grass
grow up over his cotton. In the mud, he says,
the freedmen cannot plow. The next paragraph
reports the murder, noting that any one
of the nine stab wounds would have been fatal.
Another farmer says that his corn is healthy,
but that worms may yet develop. In The Daily
Memphis Avalanche a quote from The Carroll
Record states that you were “legally arrested”;
but, “to the surprise and disappointment of all,”
you made your escape.
That night would have been
cloudy with no moon. In the unusual darkness,
it would seem, you found that you could evade
your captors. Something of this kind kept happening
in Louisiana. Of white men who had committed
that year more than two hundred illegal shootings,
stabbings, hangings, whippings, and beatings
of the legally free, not one was charged with a crime.
The newspapers’ mention of legal arrest in this case
makes it appear that stabbing a Jew nine times
at his home in front of his wife and children might
be thought unacceptable.
No further record exists
of you as Dr. DeFrance, except your expulsion
the following year from the Masonic Lodge.
The census from eighteen fifty listed you
as a farmer, head of household, Laura, your wife,
baby Ada, and Mary, then two years of age.
This was in Mississippi. In Louisiana,
as Doctor DeFrance, you were three years younger
than the farmer would be, and lived alone
with Mary, three years older than the farmer’s child.
Why would someone have made the two of you
on record six years closer in age, and how
might this bear on the savagery of the murder?
Who invented the story about the bill and the handgun?
What rage, Walter, drove you there,
to the front door, out of your mind, with a knife?
4. To Mary Terrell Howard Sessions Defrance
1775–1833
You must have been one
of the orphans and foundlings
shipped from Europe to be the wives
of men in the colonial South.
After the Revolutionary War,
according to family records, you
at the age of eight gave birth.
Maybe the records are mistaken.
But by the time there was a Bill
of Rights, you had four boys:
Asa, Robert, James, and Frederick.
And you were sixteen. Then your husband,
at the age of thirty-three, seems
to have turned his attention
elsewhere, fathering twins
by another girl, whose name
and age I cannot find.
After your first four boys
were grown, you became
at forty-one the wife
of another man to whom
you bore three sons,
Parke, Walter, and Charles,
you for the last of these past fifty.
Your one girl seems to have died
as a child. You died
when you were fifty-eight.
You were twelve years
dead when Walter named
his first girl Mary after you.
Walter then, in middle age,
stabbed my kinsman
Herman Stein nine times.
I cannot tell you why,
in front of a man’s wife
Walter would stab and stab
and stab the man, nine times…
I cannot say what good
your Walter may have done
with his surgical knife
at Shiloh or at Vicksburg,
in the worst of the battles
where he served…
nor what harm he did
before the War, to his wife
who left him, or to his children,
your grandchildren,
Ada and Mary…Mary,
whom he gave your name…
Flower Medley
after lines by Hayden Carruth, 1921–2008
Before the spasms tore his heart,
before the doctors tethered him
with oxygen, and blinded him, he breathed,
out walking with good friends, a raft
of hyacinth in Brooklyn, and the white bloom
of the blue plum broke. Daylilies came back
in summer with orange tongues of flame.
The sour cherry four years dead
bloomed one morning in October,
and a red hibiscus dropped onto the floor.
Because he put these into poems,
the old geranium still holds ten blossoms.
The moth he called Catocala, or hidden beauty,
frets, and beats the screen. For love
he named them, not just moths, or flowers:
stones, and animals, musicians by the score.
Today the purple shoots of hellebore
have broken through the frozen dirt.
Doctors, he reminded me, once brewed
from hellebore a cure for madness—
he loo
ked up—and it was deadly.
I loved Hayden when he laughed.
Eclipse
August 28, 2007
While the Moon sank into a reef of clouds,
the shadow I had come to see slid down
past craters formed a billion years before
life formed on Earth.
My father at eighty
lost three quarts of blood inside his gut
and buckled in my arms, so that we both
fell at his bedside. On the floor he told me,
eyes relaxing, quiet, No, he would be fine,
please, not to call the ambulance.
From him
when I was twelve I learned to watch the Moon
with his refractor scope, imagining
the surface as a texture human hands
could touch. Now he was gone, and I stood
in a field alone among half-moonlit rocks.
After my mother’s sweetheart died in the War,
my father, who had been her college friend,
thought they might make a life. Third
to form in my mother’s womb,
on the third day I was a mulberry of cells
suspended in the dark inside her.
In a book of myths she gave me as a child
the god of the Moon in Egypt is a scribe
delivering his wisdom to the dead.
Now one crow flapped though shelves of mist
into the floodlit aura of a mall
beyond the woods, and half in shadow,
half in clouds, the Moon kept sinking.
The Morning Star in Babylon, the book
said, was a goddess toward whom women
cried in childbirth, one who turned
toward men by dawn the cryptic sexual look
in light of which the brave supposedly seek war.
My parents’ love misled them into betrayal
and confusion. When my father turned
for comfort toward young men, the way
my mother did for years with women,
she divorced him. I was confused less
by their pain than by the numbing in myself.
Later in middle age my wife tried cursing me
to ask for love, and I withdrew. At my feet,
at the edge of a field now, rocks no longer moonlit
tilted toward the Morning Star in the east.