Long Companions (audio only)
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Some—the ones with fish names—grow so north they last a month, six weeks at most. Some others, named for the fields they look like, last longer, smaller. And these, in particular, whether trout or corn lily, onion or bellwort, just cut this morning and standing open in tapwater in the kitchen, will close with the sun. It is June, wildflowers on the table. They are fresh an hour ago, like sliced lemons, with the whole day ahead of them. They could be common mayflower lilies of the valley, day lilies, or the clustering Canada, large, gold, long-stemmed as pasture roses, belled out over
1983
When did I know that I’d have to carry it around
in order to have it when I need it, say in a pocket,
the dark itself not dark enough but needing to be
added to, handful by handful if necessary, until
the way my mother would sit all night in a room
without the lights, smoking, until she disappeared?
2019
They fly up in front of you so suddenly, tossed, like gravel, by the handful, kicked like snow or dead leaves into life. Or if it's spring they break back and forth like schools of fish silver at the surface, like the swifts I saw in the hundreds over the red tile roofs of Assisi— they made shadows, they changed sunlight, and at evening, before vespers, waved back to the blackbird nuns. My life list is one bird at a time long, what Roethke calls looking.
2012