Writing an Elegy

But so tangled in the branches they had to leave it, the conquistador’s

black beard cut from his head whose neck had snapped,

his deadness the others had to burn then, for the wind to take evenly away.

             This is what I see: the Spanish moss

as convicted to its branches — gray, colonial,

but in my century now, suspended so close each vein might well be a whole, hanging

fiction of my mind. The moss

             is a fiction of my mind: a screen, swinging

on its gothic hinges, making the light fussier as it swags, giving not just the trees

but my idea of them a Medusa look. That man,

            I think, had wanted to feed something in himself

not worth feeding, had founded a world on it — 

                                                                                                     What is it

my mind wants to get at, always extending, hungering, looking

back, always tearing open again its own modernity,

as if each thought is more than the little present

moment it sounds like, but, raised at an angle, piercing me, having me imagine,

to build such antique violences in my head, it is a thorn? This moss

has been growing for ages now, can do nothing

but snag and grow   ...    What is it the mind won’t

unsee, beautiful flaw? In another version, the woman dies

and her husband

braids her hair

through the trees.