So two new poems.
No music, I feel really naked.
Could you believe he could make that out
of all that out of that guitar?
I'm staying in the cottage.
I walked in the cottage two days ago.
And the first thing I saw on the wall of the cottage
is this great, big, beautiful broadside
from William Merwin, WS Merwin.
I've spent the last two days in the cottage working
on an article that I have to read next week in LA
on William Merwin.
So that's kind of cool.
The ghosts are everywhere.
This poem is called Peril Sonnet.
It starts with a phrase from Merwin.
Peril Sonnet.
Where do you suppose they've gone, the bees,
now that you don't see them anymore?
Four-winged among flowers, low sparks in the clover.
Even at nightfall, are they fanning?
Have they gone another place, blued
with pollen, stuck to their bristles, waiting beyond us?
Spring dwindle is what we call it.
Collapsing neonicotinoids, high level in pneumatic corn
exhaust, loss of habitat, or disappearing disease in the way
of our kind, so to speak.
What do you think they would call it?
Language older than our ears.
Were they saying it all along even at daybreak?
This one is for my father who's 7 million years old.
He's hanging in there.
Last summer, he fell.
So you know you're 89 and you fall.
That's an event.
I spent time back home in Missouri,
going back and forth between the hospital, and the rehab place,
and the old house.
There's a line in a Lowell poem, my favorite Lowell poem,
"Epilogue."
A line says, why not say what happened?
That's just hard.
Why not say what happened?
This terrible breaking, this blow, then slow.
The dogwood strewn like tissue along the flat road.
No.
The busy pollinators, the breeze in the pine shadows
in the aftermath where I drove back there.
And two bones of smoke lifting a head
along the shoulder in the high, new green weed bank running
beside the asphalt.
No.
I had come from my father.
Nothing more common.
Nothing more than such.
There was something deadly, she said, in it.
I could not breathe for the longest time over and again.
Of the genus bhutto as bee Harlan, as Harlan's red tail,
blocky in shape, goes the book, blood or brick red.
But white, I am sure, underneath, white
along its wing, which was not smoke,
but rising now, one bird.
I was coming back and couldn't breathe.
And him bruised, torn, bedridden, tubed,
taken to the brink by his body and carried aloft.
There he had fallen.
This is what happened, said the medical team.
Fallen and ripped aortic stenosis
in the process of their repair.
No.
The white bird strained as trying
to lift to a slight dihedral, the deepest deliberate wing
beats.
And barely above the Snow White lipped grasses
and the shoulder, until I thought I would hit it,
it happened, or it did not in my way of thinking.
And now why I saw two lengths of snake, helical and alive
in the talons, heavy there, writhing.
So the big bird strained for the length of time that it takes
like the oiled inner organs of a live thing, heaving in shreds.
The dogwoods, the doctors, and did I say the horrible winds?
Oh, before.
Now the air after storm, the old road, empty,
swept white by blossoms, by headlights.
My father hovering still.
Why it flew so close?
Why it was so terribly slow?
I think I hoped it would tear me to pieces.
Lift me of my genus helpless as wretched and drop me away.
I turned back to the animal.
No.
It turned its back to me.