Canticle for the Second Sunday in Lent

To be the son of a poet is to lust in a great circle. Places both of you will

            visit, for instance—Iowa cornfield, New England farm midwinter.

A mill-race. Plaque for the bell factory hidden now

By upthrust suspension, spray from which flow freezes even gravity's steady

            ictus, compressing this river into a held note. Somewhere nearby

a clock ticks

But not loudly. One draws a breath, holds it in the pale hour between delight

            and grief aware of genetic precomposition, the chest's scripted rise

and fall. The idea that history

Is more than the sum of component parts glosses pain with sentiment, yet we

            do it all the time, sitting together with friends after the roof's caved in.

Bitter words from the beloved—

A wild complaint, as in the Donal Og with its impossibilities and smooth-

            stripped compass rose: It was a bad time she took for telling me that;

it was shutting the door after the house was robbed. . . .

There is the lament, and then the assignation; shocks of ice piling up in the

            lee of the dam, and voice plucked knife-edged from a chill breeze.

In the fable those children and that livestock

Were replaced, not restored, two different things. This evening the sky leaves

            wind-knots tied in your footsteps, bits of string and grass blown up

from some uncovered place.

No longer a scrawl. In which some letters may not be spoken. You write

            around them as on the rim of a wheel revolving slowly to the rhythm

of sleet against a kitchen window,

Promising nothing this time: no ships, no towns, no seaside courts. Only the

            tannin-dark water you came from. And the green fields in the high

passes to which you will go.