A promise of new fruit in other autumns.

But today we kneel in the cold planting you, our native giant,

Defying the practical custom of our fathers,

Wrapping in your roots a lock of hair, a piece of an infant’s birth cord,

All that remains above earth of a first-born son,

A few stray atoms brought back to the elements.

We will give you what we can—our labor and our soil,

Water drawn from the earth when the skies fail,

Nights scented with the ocean fog, days softened by the circuit of bees.

We plant you in the corner of the grove, bathed in western light,

A slender shoot against the sunset.

And when our family is no more, all of his unborn brothers dead,

Every niece and nephew scattered, the house torn down,

His mother’s beauty ashes in the air,

I want you to stand among strangers, all young and ephemeral to you,

Silently keeping the secret of your birth.

METAMORPHOSIS

There were a few, the old ones promised us,

Who could escape. A few who once, when trapped

At the extremes of violence, reached out

Beyond the rapist’s hand or sudden blade.

Their fingers branched and blossomed. Or they leapt

Unthinking from the heavy earth to fly

With voices—ever softer—that became

The admonitions of the nightingale.

They proved, like cornered Daphne twisting free,

There were a few whom even the great gods

Could not destroy.

And you, my gentle ghost,

Did you break free before the cold hand clutched?

Did you escape into the lucid air

Or burrow secretly among the dark

Expectant roots, to rise again with them

As the unknown companion of our spring?

I’ll never know, my changeling, where you’ve gone,

And so I’ll praise you—flower, bird, and tree—

My nightingale awake among the thorns,

My laurel tree that marks a god’s defeat,

My blossom bending on the water’s edge,

Forever lost within your inward gaze.

PENTECOST

After the death of our son

Neither the sorrows of afternoon, waiting in the silent house,

Nor the night no sleep relieves, when memory

Repeats its prosecution.

Nor the morning’s ache for dream’s illusion, nor any prayers

Improvised to an unknowable god

Can extinguish the flame.

We are not as we were. Death has been our pentecost,

And our innocence consumed by these implacable

Tongues of fire.

Comfort me with stones. Quench my thirst with sand.

I offer you this scarred and guilty hand

Until others mix our ashes.

THE LITANY

This is a litany of lost things,

a canon of possessions dispossessed,

a photograph, an old address, a key.

It is a list of words to memorize

or to forget—of amo, amas, amat,

the conjugations of a dead tongue

in which the final sentence has been spoken.

This is the liturgy of rain,

falling on mountain, field, and ocean—

indifferent, anonymous, complete—

of water infinitesimally slow,

sifting through rock, pooling in darkness,