After Archibald MacLeish
 
And, as it happens, the mute child is not 
rebellious nor stupid, and of course it is winter.
Autumn has rollicked its leaves tripped in dull
joy all over itself. Wait for the power to know: 
sound out these garbled messages, the patois,
the bird sounds that unleashed his rage against
the hunched talkers, the gnarled walkers who should
have stayed silent.  The hoe as it turned over each writhing
clump of philosopher, the tines of each rake as it breaks
apart the grass. How long does it last? The astonished 
bell when it breaks apart its clapper.  How many months
can he swallow and burp this river of vowels into the air?
He sucks each stoned consonant, sun-warm into his 
maw of nest like the birch branches he seeks in winter.
His tongue is a blood-thick worm trying to bust into
the ragged bone of molar. How he basks under such wild
utterances. He knew, they all did, that this belching
of sound would please them.  And they would never think
of each other the same way. Just as we had always known,
he is a choice. He wasn’t able to waste breath the way
the others above him had, the green puffs of leaves
as they filter the sun.  He watches a skylark over head
and practices out loud, because he wants to: “this is speech.”
The silent shadow as their wings cross his feet—
                        

For Joel Solonche
 
I haven’t written for a while, and since Kinnell has eaten Oatmeal 
with Keats, I am taking  J's advice and trying to lure a famous dead
 
poet to the breakfast table.  Keats was tubercular and didn’t eat much.
Emily Dickinson would be an irritant, all those yelps and dashes-- back 
 
and forth to the stove.  I like silence in the morning. I like quiet
while I ponder.  I am having Gooseberry Jam on an English Muffin,
 
my father’s favorite. He mentioned Gooseberries a lot.
His family farmed in South Jersey; he was born in 1927, same as Kinnell.
 
Those dirt roads, the Hobo stones that were placed on my grandparent’s 
property make me want to summon our poetic grandfather, Walt Whitman.
 
Walt, you were in bad shape eating oysters in the morning, I praise the body
Cholesterol.  May I say, you seem to dominate my English Muffin.
 
Walt, after taking to the open road, may I suggest a shower
rather than your penchant for coffee cake? I am noticing, the perfumes
 
of your body are not of the lavender kind.  Walt has begun drumming
the table top with his fingers, talking about the beauty of a spoon, 
 
the integrity of working people.  I pass him a loaf of bread to remind him:
“I loaf and invite my soul” but he doesn’t take the hint.  I reckon, he may be
 
a morning person, but I would rather be alone than listen to old 
dead poets who chatter on about the beauty of a spoon,  the honor
 
of a gooseberry. Gooseberry?  I have never met a live one.
I look forward to my tea going cold, the rising steam of poets to go silent.
                        

I dreamt about the Muslim girl again,
her cream sari drifting around me 
like the wings of an angel.
 
Mornings, when I make my egg, I break
its sturdy shell, crack its perfect globe.
There are minutes when you can put one
on its end, it stands alone every year.
 
I’ve never tried to balance one in India,
never been there during Spring. The moon
would rise like a judge, I’d rise from a bed 
and slip into the black embrace of nightfall.
At supper, our knees would touch under
the wooden table the hotel had provided,
my husband and I’d eat silently,
ask no questions about our day.
 
Sunday had me thinking of that white eye
the night before. Each egg turned to stone
like the last pebbles in the empty cave. Some
wandered the earth, not quite dead—not quite
living, all part of a divine plan.
 
Once home, I’d feel differently.
I began packing for our next trip. Business
for him, a holiday for me. I stopped thinking
of the moon as Judas or Jesus or an egg
as a symbol.
 
I began to think though, that she’d followed
me home in dreams. A woman who knew
the risk of a lover’s kiss.
 
Sometimes just before sleep, I close my eyes
thinking of the face of a woman no longer a girl.
Her cream sari wraps around her like a loosened 
cocoon about to free a Luna-moth.
 
When she leans forward to tuck me in at night,
I think of the casual way she is jostled 
at the bazaar. How we have all gotten
used to her. The severed ends have healed 
from where her father cut off
her hands. The stumps are as livid
and pink, as an Easter Sunday sunrise.