Classic Poem

She lies now in the long
dawn in a room mid-maple high.
She sleeps. Twenty million leaves
clatter, conveying the blue-green-gold
light to the south and east windows
minted into their millionfold
swivelling shadows. Under the eaves
jays bluster, ravening among
numbed wasps, too slow either to sting or fly.

She'll wake up soon and go down
to the Labrador pup slobbering with joy,
seven cats with their tails in the air,
six diffident hens by the back door,
old gelding grumbling at his rail fence —
as contented to feed them as to sleep some more.
She is content either here or there,
the way clouds are: Sort of a con-
densation of kindness with no alloy.

Clouds and sun too. She brings
gardens out of the bare ground
outdoors or in. On the south side
of the house not a window sill
but is jungled with marjoram,
lemon verbena, saffron, dill.
She pities them, pinches their dried
leaves off — and either talks or sings
something they understand

and answer in all their flowers. Her
age is a half mine, but I think
is also ancient, like the race
of women itself. I could not tell —
but she could — the way Esther, bring-
ing nothing but her own softness, mel-
ted an iron king; or with what grace
Rebekah, further back, in Ur,
made Abraham's tired camels drink.











By permission of the author.