Chaconne

for Pompon’s Ours blanc at the Musée d’Orsay

The grace of it cries out!

Around I go and take
my time, and dance now slow,
now quick, about this bear
where hands and maul once danced
and bore away the stone.
The bear’s a great white stone.
The stone’s a great white bear.

Deep goes the carving hand.
It carves a stare in me,
my staring carves a dance,
my dancing sings this bear,
we carve away the air.
The bear’s a great white stone.
The stone’s a great white bear.

How smooth a stone can be
and move so like a bear.
A weathered hand’s revealed
this shape our eyes lift up.
Now sniff and shake the ground!
The bear’s a great white stone.
The stone’s a great white bear.

This stone is bare white time.
We feel its weight descend,
and counterclockwise go,
but why unwind it now?
The grace of it cries out!
The bear’s a great white stone.
The stone’s a great white bear.

Sleeping on the porch

Time was,
some evening looking down the gravel road,
you might see darkness striding in.
Now, just as then, the yard, more field than yard,
slopes down to it, where the black pines begin.

The dogwood’s crooked limbs
now lean too close, closer than memory, to the house.
How else could it have been
as you chased fireflies, as she rocked on the screen porch,
each flick of her church-fan, a beacon’s pulse—

on one side “The Light of the World,” a blank
the other? What game was it then?
“Riddle me this, you daren’t say . . . no:
I hold a million tiny moths a-blossom in my arms.
Quick before they fly, tell me who am I?” “I know!

I know!” “Well then, come in,” she’d laugh,
“come in.” Caught out, you had to go.
But what punishment was that? You sat on pallets,
cool ironed sheets over cotton blankets,
and shouted trick questions

to fetch the trick word, bring the last runner to bed.
Then you’d wait for the sounds, the sounds to keep you up
until they made you sleep—
crickets, whip-poor-wills, eighteen-wheelers’ whine
and wash

miles, miles away—until you woke,
then much as now, to that peculiar morning light
wading through the pines, over the field,
to the sound not there,
the doorway empty, the dogwood bare.