MAUREEN ALSOP
IN RELEASE OF THE COMING PASSAGE
In dreams there is a slow articulation
of my absence. Deer track through cedar,
moss, and that long trespass, the wheel I fall
under into sleep. Nightly, my confidences
spill easily through the water meadow,
the dead arc through conversations, settling
into culverts awaiting the morning’s updraft. Fishhooks
shine off my sister’s ear as we,
here in the hereafter, with our clay eyes,
swim in the old shifts of root, as restless
as body. When I move I move
with my new mind, the unanswerable; memory
is the motherly flavor of apple pie. Dear one,
I ask myself, over and over, with what language
do you dictate the violet wood shade
I once admired? Perhaps, I’ll remain. But
if I ever go back into the space
before I began clearing the stairwell of loose debris,
newspaper clippings, old photographs, books,
I might salvage those marked passages
I never returned to. Notes
in the margin guide me as someone
who would read, neither in innocence nor splendor,
of the moment when something
crumbled between pages.
+++
BEQUEST
A blessing of ghost bees lulls the serum
of your speech. O, unlit fire. Your confection
in the mouth upon the mouth of whose name. Grass
in the whispered landscape leaks a dry glow.
Here primitive boughs of lilac
undress the swallow’s eye. The bilious sky’s
slow vigilance is re-born. And the quiet
of the fuck bodies, their infinite pages,
are laid open in the sun’s library. Everywhere,
remembered snow, a fury of the last gone.