Sedimentary Blues, and: Triolet, and: The Unconsoled

Abstract

Sedimentary Blues after Lisel Mueller's "After Whistler" There are children who should have been stones. Instead they are put to suck at the cool dugs of water and wind, Where they are broken down into sediments again – Silts and clays and loams – And carefully recast in human form. Something goes wrong with the heart. When the other children enter The long summer grasses in pairs, From a distance they watch them go, [End Page 31] But soon return to their own solitary Pleasures – a passion for knowledge or things, For doing some one thing well. They are the natural scholars Teachers love, that parents love To brag about, although they don't pretend To understand what God has lodged with them, Mysterious mute creatures, all memory and cold fire. While young, stone-children are able to bear their flesh With a measure of equanimity and ease, For then they still believe in its perfecting – Some intense heat or pressure brought to bear That will change the body's shale into a slate Upon which time will write its crystal names. Triolet – Gerard Manley Hopkins He swore he would not look at stallions But stallions galloped through his dreams [End Page 32] Their flanks in sun gashed gold, vermillion He swore he would not look at stallions But they were everywhere! battalions Strong: crossing the quad, in choir, at games He swore he would not look at stallions But stallions galloped through his dreams The Unconsoled That blood-curdling cry, that sharp ascending wail: Wooooh sweet jesus somebody wake up the world! Adrenaline still courses through my veins And I am running banging on my own front door To rouse my father slow to rouse inside; When the 911 woman asks if he's alive I tell her I don't know his wife just found Him please god you've got to send someone! After the coroner has come and shown How purple marks on the dead man's chest spell heart Attack, pronounced him dead, zipped up the bag And gone, She, the girl I was, stands out Behind her neighbor's pulpwood truck – the truck He did not drive today, nor will drive Tomorrow or tomorrow or the next day – Alone but for the moon whose unaccountable Countenance she abhors. She sets out the Equation in her head: on one side, This moon and the gold light of an ordinary day In southern autumn, the smell of burning leaves Sharp on the air of early afternoon; On the other, this man, their neighbor, her father's Bosom friend, husband, father, grandfather, Hammer in hand about some routine labor, Falling among the litter of leaves in his own Backyard and lying there as light etched The hours on the trees – mid-morning, noon; First sun then moon. She frowns hard as she worries The equation. And then the dead man's wife is at Her side, saying, Hon, don't take it so to heart; Come back inside where it's warm with the rest of us. [End Page 33] Perhaps she feels how cold and still the girl is, Feels it inside herself and dares not touch her Lest, in steering the other back to life, Her strength should fail and the girl should pull her over. On one side, the girl is thinking while they wait, The whole of life, this world, my own small life, Frail cargo of not quite eighteen years; And on the other, Michelle, at twenty, Murdered, Helen murdered at forty-nine, Tammy, like herself, not quite eighteen, nine Months dead from cancer. Let others justify The ways of God to men; she never would. She'd already stood the s.o.b. on trial, Stood life itself on trial and found both Wanting. But who was she to keep a grieving Woman shivering in cold? And so she moved As if to say that yes, she would come in, Although inside she knew she never...