Now You Care. Di Brandt

on the windiest days,

      the chorus of ancestors

      full throated among the trees,

      bits of severed limbs

      float through the room,

      the blue plastic thermos

      in the window promises

      black tea and landmines

      halfway across the world.

      The surface keeps slipping, Alain.

      Somewhere deep inside us

      the centre holds.

      Say it is so, Chinua,

      say it is so.

       The poets visit the Rosewell Arms

      Surprised to find,

      on their country rambles,

      how he singles her out

      in every pub,

      the ‘village drunk,’

      proclaiming his love:

       They don’t know, Robbie, they don’t know, the kinship of those who walk, as we have done, through living fire.

      His friends clap him

      on the back, laugh,

      pour him another drink,

      she turns back to the bar,

      smiling, glass in hand,

      discussing Yeats.

      The floor rocks under

      his sea legs, his skin burns.

      Long ago he learned

      to substitute drink

      for touch, to hold

      the terror in.

       So many unrequited singers, Bobby. The fire made diamonds of your eyes. The breathing world cries, ‘I love you too.’

      A modest proposal

      This night I am haunted by your stray dogs, Frankie,

      of Albert Street, their thin, eager love, abject,

      you called it, useful, waving your hand, smiling slightly, over

      shrimp cocktail and Chablis, nicely

      chilled, their backbones broken, flesh frozen into fear.

      Let me confess, dear Francis, your confessions were not

      unattractive to me, your wife the psychologist busy

      helping every poor sinner and no time for you.

      Your shaking hand, your heaving trembling chest.

      Your twenty year sacrifice of every tender feeling

      in the name of civic love. Your soldier’s fortitude.

      Your impressive million dollar contract to inject them

      with whatever poison you feel like to advance our knowledge of

      their pain. Like every poet I can

      assure you I have prostituted myself for less, gathering fuel in

      vacant lots, so zu sprechen, Herr Doktor,

      wagging my tail, eagerly, panting for healing in the morning and

      vivisection at night, suffering

      my sainthood graciously, my bowels domesticated,

      my howls unheard in the abandoned hermitage.

      St. Norbert in August

      How the primroses hurt us

      in the ripeness of summer

      among the cathedral ruins,

      the stones singing,

      the grass stirring in the heat,

      bees thrumming,

      the flies lazy, contented,

      the shining wheat

      (‘O how the wheat is shining’)

      the brown river sluggish,

      the gnarled apple trees,

      the maples surrounded by light,

      the goldenrod,

      the grasshoppers,

      sweet clover on the wind,

      wild turkeys parading

      through the wild grass,

      the sun heavy on the earth,

      our thirsty skin heaving,

      the bandura dancing, O!

      St. Norbert in July

       after Louise Halfe

      Throb of buffalo

      herds, drumming

      under the earth.

      Whiff of sage

      in the wind.

      Chokecherry

      branches, bowing,

      heavy with fruit.

      Sob of grass.

      Wheels rumbling.

      Burning tipis,

      smoking flesh.

      I Thirst Dance,

      Ghost Dance,

      I Give-Away Dance,

      Beg Dance.

      ‘Shot our children

      as they gathered

      wood.’

      Skull Dance.

      ‘A mountain of bones.’

      Accidentally

      Because the millennium has ended. Because the children have taken over the monasteries, and filled them with fishnets, wildflowers, paper lanterns, donkeys made of straw.

      Because Our Lady of the Prairies stepped down off her pedestal last August, walked across the yellow stubble fields in her white silk dress, and didn’t come back.

      When the rivers flooded and the grass along the banks turned black, and the mosquitoes came, billions of them, to plague us.

      Our first born, daughters, angry as hell at our parental betrayal of them, we didn’t know, we didn’t know.

      At the poetry festival, all the young women wore violets and goldenrod in their hair.

      They said the house was haunted, and it was, the dead walking through it, dazed, in black and red velvet, the children screaming at them, joyful and afraid, the monks sullen, retreating in the shadows.

      Alissa, alone among the children, stared back at the ghost bride in her faded brocade, let the white gloved hand of death touch her cheek, and didn’t flinch. Her memory welling up in her like a flame, spider knowledge.

      You were there, then, with red hair, carrying one of the dead over your shoulder, and your aura of sadness, in all that commotion, cut a wave of silence in the air.

      Who knows why anything happens? Or how lucky we are, in spite of these alarms, these signs of an era ending, and new beginnings?

      The spirits have been good to us, have visited us, with blessings, in spite of our inattention, our distractedness, and yes, we are grateful, we are deeply grateful, though we have forgotten the words for this prayer, this alleluia, this amen.