Bury

Bury

by Iris Moulton

 

I am from over there, the one you’ve read about.

 

In the heat

of spring and summer we lay artifacts to the ground: a clay pot

in which we carried the words of lovers, flint tools to hunt them

down. Winter will always bury this. We wait for the tomb

longer than the resurrection; knowing pulls our hours

like a hide. In the thaw

we will start again, harvest amongst the shards.

 

Snakes in the rushes come

to swallow whole the eggs of the killdeer

as she dances. We say watch where you step,

more to protect our dangers

from being chased too far. Someone has pulled a fawn from

the trail over there, broken, still spotted. Her eyes are wet bubbles against

air. I am glad we can still die out here; it’s why we came.

 

You, sister, have come to believe the jackrabbit

and hare are good luck, symbols of rebirth. You are

ready to lay a foundation, see the shape

of a strange new shelter. One night the sky was big

and its blackness made tiny globes around us. We were sitting

at a truck-stop and the bottle was cool against our hands. You said

There’s one but I couldn’t see it. I kept squinting but all

you could say was over there over there

 

The wood of our houses was painted

to look richer. My parents

wrote this but never wrote it down. Silkworms spun our funeral dresses

and baptismal gowns. Wasps with nests papered of

wanted posters. We once shot blindly against the hillside over there. Use every

part of the animal; our people emerged full-bellied and adorned.

The trees are skinny and sick, and can’t hide us.

 

Bury them where they fall, we will be guided by the sound of

boots on hollow ground, and this becomes the stone lined trail. Home.

We hunker over there in the hills, in gullies spotted

with cookfires. Wolves strip pearls off the fallen

for teeth. He, that most terrible instrument, Destroying Angel, made

of his own hair a wig for a typhoid widow. She was a grandmother of mine.

When she wore it the whisper

of his ghosts came through her eyes.

 

I must have been thinking of the usual things that night

lofted above sobriety, and our one street left where outlaws still strut

and pose. Below us lilac, cherry trees. Bird calls and lovers voices

blossom into the air. Wine stained lips and floors, someone

over there laughing at how young the world was getting without him.

It was, for me, the usual small sadnesses creeping through. How twilight draws the city closer as if to listen.

How many there were of us who had never spoken

but had been meeting each other such a long time. Your hand

nodding as if to sleep against my thigh. Stretched on different timelines

nothing and everything matter so much.

 

            You are allowed a cot, a blanket, a chest with a broken lock.

It will come back. Spring leaves us wondering if winter is ever gone, or just

hiding on the mountain over there, waiting to tumble down if provoked.

It will be one white sheet for one abandoned

corpse. It will make for us one grave. We have been practicing

for generations to tremble from cold and not fear, to change

the color of snow with our enemies.

You may hold another’s hand through this, and it may be your own.

Take inventory of what is left and what is new

when it begins again.

original poem         copyright 2009       by  Iris Moulton