And the next poem the imagery is largely
taken from an island, a Greek island called Santorini.
And it's a poem written for a child, who died of leukemia.
The poem's title is the poet goes about her business.
Michelle has become another dead little girl.
An easy poem, instant Praxitelean, instant
75-year-old photograph of my grandmother
when she was a young woman with shadows.
I imagine we're blue around her eyes.
The beauty of it, such guarded sweetness.
What agreed of bruised gardenias.
Oh, Christ, whose name rips silk.
I have seen raw cypresses so dark the mind comes
to them without color.
Dark on the Greek Hillside, dark volcanic, dry, and stone.
Where the oldest women of the world
are standing dressed in black up in the branches of fig
trees in the gorge knocking with as much quickness
as their weakness will allow.
Weakness, which my heart must not confuse with tenderness.
And on the other side of the island,
a woman walks up the path with a burden of leaves
on her head guiding the goats with sounds she makes up
and then makes up again.
The other darkness is easy.
The men in the dreams who coming together to me with knives.
There are so many traps and many look courageous.
The body goes into such raptures of obedience.
But the huge stones on the desert
resemble nobody's mother.
I remember the snake after its skin had been cut away,
and it was dropped, it started to move
across the clearing making its beautiful waving motion.
It was all meat and bone.
Pretty soon, it was covered with dust.
It seemed to know exactly where it wanted to go,
toward any dark trees.