Spells. Annie Finch

      A groping fist would prove me what I am

      I am not a woman

      My vigil is too restless

      I never thought till now I could be had.

      I can’t forget you, that’s the awful thing.

      I am not a woman.

      I curse what I have been

      I am solidifying like a rock

      That turns inside itself each time she turns

      WALK WITH ME

      Walk with me just a while, body of sunlight,

      body of grass, surface of trees,

      head bending to the earth we have tasted,

      body of death, surface of leaves.

      Sinking hooves in the mud by the river,

      root of the live earth, live through my body.

      Sinking body, walk in me now.

      TWO BODIES

      Two bodies, balanced in mass and power,

      move in a bed through the dark,

      under the earliest human hour.

      A night rocks, like an ark.

      They reach through the ceilings of the night,

      tall as animals.

      Through their valleys bends the light

      of their fertile hills.

      Two bodies breathe their close hellos

      through interlocking pores,

      while that hush of beating slows,

      held, with many oars,

      heart over heart, leg over leg,

      trading still breath, until,

      heart over heart, and seed into egg,

      night holds two bodies still.

      FINAL AUTUMN

      Maple leaves turn black in the courtyard.

      Light drives lower and one bluejay crams

      our cold memories out past the sun,

      each time your traces come past the shadows

      and visit under my looking-glass fingers

      that lift and block out the sun.

      Come—I’ll trace you one final autumn,

      and you can trace your last homecoming

      into the snow or the sun.

      ELEGY FOR MY FATHER

       HLF, August 8, 1918—August 22, 1997

       Bequeath us to no earthly shore until

       Is answered in the vortex of our grave

       The seal’s wide spindrift gaze towards paradise.

       —Hart Crane, “Voyages”

       If a lion could talk, we couldn’t understand it

       —Ludwig Wittgenstein

      Under the ocean that stretches out wordlessly

      past the long edge of the last human shore,

      there are deep windows the waves haven’t opened,

      where night is reflected through decades of glass.

      There is the nursery, there is the nanny,

      there are my father’s unreachable eyes

      turned towards the window. Is the child uneasy?

      His is the death that is circling the stars.

      In the deep room where candles burn soundlessly

      and peace pours at last through the cells of our bodies,

      three of us are watching, one of us is staring

      with the wide gaze of a wild, wave-fed seal.

      Incense and sage speak in smoke loud as waves,

      and crickets sing sand towards the edge of the hourglass.