Huptemugs

There’s a spirit in me that admits no weakness.

Is it the best of me or worst?

Cow daisies burn their stars into the stalled air of pastures.

No one else cares whether they’ll last.

I shirk the sick and go out to pick flowers,

Bushels of the tough and prickly-legged,

Whichever I can pull out of the gulch,

And push them into thunder-pitchers.

An invalid in a peignoir pulls the covers over her head

In the high cherry bed great-grandmother had made

To match the chest of drawers.

Solitudes gather under the Beau D’arc.

I ache for the meanness, the glorious meanness

That knocked croquet balls into its soft meal trunk,

To hear the thwack of that mallet,

To be it, as it cleanly cracks and lets the other ball be gone.

Acquisitive gall made my people call themselves victorious.

They thought they won the Mexican War, among others.

One ancestor drove his bayonet into the dirt when he returned — 

This tree is what took root and bloomed,

Though Beau D’arcs grow complex in illness.

The locusts have chewed its thatch into fretwork,

Its leaves fluted crisp, poxed yellowish, kissed by the worm.

Huptemugs believed that train rides to the capital to hear

Charlemagne singing Franz would cure the soul

(As venison is cured) against life’s turmoil — 

They could not tolerate complaints of the feet,

Corns and hammertoes, evidence of rot.

If generous you might have called us committed to transcendence,

Though who that ever fought her way into an opera box

Ever let the arias consign her to a fate of constant care?

There is a spirit in me that admits no weakness.

When it sings, the rest of me despairs.