It's the first night, I suppose,
in more than eighty year
Hattie has slept alone. . . .
And outdoors, in the falling
snow, without bedclothes
or night light and none near
but the deaf sunken stone
were one to awaken calling.

What could old Hattie have done
wrong, anyway?—Made raw-
milk cheese, rubbed eggs, admired
her rose-red Christmas cactus, and
rocked, looking out at one
more mid-February thaw,
drifts melting and dungwagon mired—
that now like a reprimand

she might have heard sixty-eight
or seventy years ago,
(such as ‘Hattie thinks she is clever,
but will go to bed with boxed ears
and no supper’) she is told: ‘Tonight
you'll sleep with shoes on in the snow
in the cemetery and never
never wake up in a million years.’











By permission of the author.

We shouldn't be too hard
on Gravity. There's the chance
it was always a kind of love,
a fearful possessiveness
and vectoring inward,
so that eternity
couldn't even commence
or even dream of
its long ontomachy
of imperfect deliverance,
of fire against ice,

of then against now,
being Gravity-locked
in a “point of infinite
density, zero extent”—
a universe in escrow . . . .
And then that Categorical
BANG and the cataract
of spectra that came of it.
and belled out to invent
motion and interval! …

And hasn't Gravity,
hanging on as it did—
as a kind of love would—
exponentialled its loss?
Or don't those hybrid
and problematical gyres,
the atom, the galaxy,
part lumen and part mass,
qualify as a holocaust
of irreconcilable desires?











By permission of the author.