PERSON, TENSE, MOOD AND VOICE

(for Leah, who wanted a Tomorrow Sandwich and got tomatoes like the rest of us)

 

 

                        A dark age in a man-made forest,

                        rendered in grisaille.  I thought,

                        in the Old World as a young tourist,

                        those openings to rooms wrought

 

                        in shuttered stone at once could prove

                        reincarnation and define

                        those generations.  What strange love

                        will speak for us and draw our lines?

 

                        Once I went to Canterbury

                        on a train to see what the past

                        looked like.  Was it a hut on a prairie

                        or perhaps a ruin?  They asked

 

                        my child if she’d eat “to-MAH-to.”  “I’d LOVE

                        a Tomorrow Sandwich,” she cried, enchanted.

                        At the end of a narrow street, above

                        the pavement flew the vassal-planted

 

                        vaults of blue and gold, free-soared

                        the vast magic castle.  I stood

                        at the turn of the twisted stairs where warred

                        the king and his bishop for a sainthood,

 

folded in the bloody lap

                        of a great martyrdom and knew

                        I had been there before, foresaw the trap

                        closing around me gently, true

 

                        to my loves, but suited strangely, as artists

                        are, to destiny as duty.

                        Now I stand stricken, long-lost chartist,

                        in the dusty attic with remembered beauty,

 

                        wearing a piece of clothing for each

                        of my dead friends.  After a life

                        of needful service, who will redeem

                        this rubble?  Who would speak to a wife,

 

                        stranded among these scraps and tag ends?

                        The women who went before would say,

                        “Waste nothing.”  They pieced the castoff ends

                        of the journey of a lifetime, away

 

                        in a covered wagon, into a rule

                        called “The Road to California.”  Speaking

                        a private language, a troubled pool

                        of baby things deep on the creaking

 

                        boards, this tide of rags, eddies

                        about my feet in wavelets, laps

                        my ankles; I feel the beat of the steady

                        coriolis lapping at

 

                        the world, winding time backward

                        and forward in creation’s dance.

                        Hills become islands, rivers run slackward

                        or to the full, the smoothly slanted

 

                        floor of the sea concealed and revealed,

                        the do-si-do of oceans, march

                        of mountains in and out, reeling

                        beneath the earth and made once more.