At Home

The coquettish embroiderer collects
mourning clothes, slips them on at midnight
hearing the powdery flap of wings,
an invisible dust settling the town.
Death, she knows, is a night dew closing
face of child or friend, weighing them
down, down — reeds blent with water.
It is the wound inside the brain,
spears of light entering, re-entering
to a pounding silence of blood.
It is the hourglass neck through which
patiently, year after year, she labours.
Between each human space, light gutters
in Amherst. Inside the creepered house
the woman's mind breaks clear, at home
in dolphin tides of ecstacy. From ashes
she rakes myths of love and power,
strange leaping flames, her too-haughty God
displaced by men with clean hearts, long beards.
One of them, dying, she tends upstairs.
Into her silence words curl and pry,
questioning tendrils burrow and branch.
In bridal white, she drifts through
the noonday garden, sprinkling hollyhocks.