Perpendicular

It would have been a fine path for a lizard to cross

but I saw none. Brambles and sweet briar grew

on the town side, poppies and wild grasses on the river.

Too hot for birds, the ducks were out, in water and mud,

and frogs were out, by the hundreds it seemed, saying,

Way, Way, in their deepest voices. It was beautiful there

but I’d seen beauty and its opposite so often

that when warmth broke over my skin I remembered winter,

the way fresh grief undoes you the moment you’re fully awake.

When she turned two, I asked my young friend

what she would serve at her birthday party and she said,

Tofu and cupcakes. When she was three and I was very sad

she called and said, What are you doing? Picking flowers?

She talked in poems like she was dreaming all the time

or very old or Virginia Woolf. More often in the first world

one wakes from not to the nightmare. When I dreamed I lost

my love I willed myself awake because I would not

survive the pain again, even dreaming. Which is responsible

for that mercy, Doktor, the conscious or the un-? I want

the poppies picked and I want the poppies left where they grow.

Like looking through the window of a moving train

at someone walking up a road lined with poplars

and being someone walking up a road lined with poplars.

The train and the trees, a shower of petals and bees,

sun on the glass and the train perpendicular to the road.

Things entirely themselves arriving in the deep

double shadows of the grass and passersby.