This is a poem that received its title after I wrote it,
which often happens with me.
So I sometimes never know if they go together.
But it's fun anyway.
And it started because this summer
on our educational TV station, I saw
a war movie called Operation Burma that
had a terrific scene with parachutes in it.
Beautiful really.
Just beautiful.
And only lasted maybe two seconds.
The poem is entitled Eleanor Roosevelt.
And it is perhaps an imaginary address to her, and perhaps
to her final loneliness.
I don't know.
Eleanor Roosevelt. You forget every tenderness
for this memory of a walk across the lawn.
Dark clouds embrace you, and the breathless children
on the terrace swaying into their mother's skirts.
Plead the loan of your apparition to calm bad dreams.
Against the damp breeze, women fan their white feathers
wired together and tickle their lover's necks.
From this, you plunge forward into a blue Asian sky.
The dim engine sound loosens a display
of soldiers drifting down with the sun behind them.
The parachutes open like wide overturned tulips.
White hot the first nears a clearing,
and silhouetted beyond the transparent cloth
is the form of a man falling among the falling cloth.
Like a dancer, his shadow buckles
to abstraction to pure color against harder purer color.
And you are left with the self that
scrapes the bottom of a sleepless night.
The individual forgotten faces turn silvery
like leaves and severe summer weather.
The nameless men and women who now have nothing
to do with anything chill and dry.
They are ancestral.
They rattle like pods on black stalks in November.