I would like to read the title poem of my book--
The Need to Hold Still.
Winter weeds, survivors of a golden age,
take over the open land.
Pale armies redressing the balance.
Again, we live in a time of fasting,
burlap cassocks, monks on their knees,
bells tolling in an empty sky.
Among the thin, the trampled on, the inarticulate
clothed in drafts, and rooted in shocked Earth,
which remembers nothing, fields and fields of them.
Teasel, yarrow, goldenrod, wheat, bedstraw,
Queen Anne's lace, dropseed, love grass,
plain, strong names--
bread and water.
A woman coming in from a walk notices
how drab her hair has become.
That gray and brown are colors she disappears into.
That her body has stopped asking for anything except calm.
When she brings them into the house
and shortens them for the vase, their
stems break like old bones, clean.
No holding on, no bitter odor, no last drop of juice.
Hers, as long as she wants them.
Their freedom from either/or will outlast hers every time.
The dignity of form after seduction and betrayal
by color.
The heads separate but held together by an old design
no one has thought to question.
The open pods that have given and given again,
dullness of straw which underlies the rose,
the grape, the kiss.
The narrow leaf blades shape of the body.
The fine stems, earliest brushstrokes,
lines in the rock, on the wall, the page.