“MY THOUGHTS ARE EAGLES’ FOOD”

     From a poem by Fulke Greville

I seek aid: My grandmother’s gilt

clock that plays Greensleeves

now fills me with dread; can you

muffle its sharp-toothed chime?

Dab my forehead with rose water,

sing me a song I never heard before,

tell me something to me make me laugh

and rest content—a state unknown.

My thoughts run races, mousey

and fearful, scattering to the edges

of the autumn lawn. Leave them

to the raptors, now. Shame

turns out to be a choice, a wire taut

on the trap we set ourselves, of use until it’s not.

 

THIS LIFE

I would be the dove, tucked

in the heavy arbor, listening to the rain

tap the leaf lobes. I would be the bear,

stupid beneath the snow.



Say a syringe came to tease me with relief,

offering my stretch of earth: for this,

I would pay even the jewels of poetry.

But bribes don’t work.



Did I agree to this? The sages tell us

that blindness in the morning

may give way to sight by evening....



How they lie. We know only a little more

than the animals, and it is pain. This life

that demands, with every sun-up, to be lived.