To Margaret W------

Sixty-two, sixty-three, I most remember
As time W. C. Williams dies and we are
Back from a hard two years in Guatemala
Where the meager provision of being
Schoolmaster for the kids of the patrones
Of two coffee plantations has managed
Neither a life nor money. Leslie dies in
Horror of bank giving way as she and her

Come, dear children, let us away;
Down and away below!
Now my brothers call from the bay,
Now the great winds shoreward blow,
Now the salt tides seaward flow;
Now the wild white horses play,
Champ and chafe and toss in the spray.
Children dear, let us away!

Merry Margaret,
As midsummer flower,
Gentle as a falcon
Or hawk of the tower:
With solace and gladness,
Much mirth and no madness,
All good and no badness;
So joyously,

to a young child Márgarét, áre you gríeving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?

Very well, you liberals,
And navigators into realms intellectual,
You sailors through heights imaginative,
Blown about by erratic currents, tumbling into air pockets,
You Margaret Fuller Slacks, Petits,
And Tennessee Claflin Shopes—
You found with all your boasted wisdom
How hard at the last it is

I. PULSE

Light over the Hudson recovers a Caribbean I have
never seen.
We list islands: Molokai, Oahu, Kauai; St. Lucia,
Haiti….
The surf folds tunnels of light
while a hand folds over a wrist (tell-tale pulse),
counting. The long tunnel is a wrist of blown spume.

It is like a dance, I think, this silence full of questions.
Pulse-beat; pulse-beat. Pulse. Pulse.

I push my hair back into the memories of palm trees,

I know I’ll lose her.
One of us will decide. Linda will say she can’t
do this anymore or I’ll say I can’t. Confused
only about how long to stay, we’ll meet and close it up.
She won’t let me hold her. I won’t care that my
eyes still work, that I can lift myself past staring.
Nothing from her will reach me after that.
I’ll drive back to them, their low white T-shaped house

Whenever I see two women
crowned, constellated friends

it is as if three birch trees wept together
in a field by a constant spring.

The third woman isn’t there

exactly, but just before them a flame
bursts out, then disappears

in a blurred, electric shining

for Arthur Freeman Pigfoot (with Aces Under) Passes

The heat’s on the hooker.

Old Meg she was a Gipsy,
And liv'd upon the Moors:
Her bed it was the brown heath turf,
And her house was out of doors.

Her apples were swart blackberries,
Her currants pods o' broom;
Her wine was dew of the wild white rose,
Her book a churchyard tomb.

Her Brothers were the craggy hills,
Her Sisters larchen trees—
Alone with her great family
She liv'd as she did please.

She fell asleep on Christmas Eve:
At length the long-ungranted shade
Of weary eyelids overweigh'd
The pain nought else might yet relieve.

Our mother, who had lean'd all day
Over the bed from chime to chime,
Then rais'd herself for the first time,