up, and then the other. But I’d never

seen any lupine canines lower

into sight in the corners of the mouth

of my mother—

and when she died, I could not tell

just when, and it didn’t matter.

Spectrum Ballad

When I looked up the spectrum, and red was the first

color, I thought of Ruth Stone’s

hair, and her favorite high school sweater,

because the boys liked red sweaters—

the color which speaks of the crevices

inside the butte of the nipple,

which closes when it

stiffens—singing

its high note. And I thought of the tearful

eye of the penis, and the brilliance of the cunt’s

scarlet vestibule,

and the throat, and nose, and the ear, and I thought

to think of the inside of the anus,

hold the rose window of its eros

in my mind a moment.

They said that red came first because when

white light passes through a prism

red has the longest wavelength—then orange, yellow,

green, blue, and violet the shortest.

Why didn’t they put the shortest

first, or was red slowest, or oldest,

or were amber and magenta there from the start,

red among the earliest

of our ancestors, as they will outlive us

on the black earth.

Ballad of the Blossoming Branch

Maybe he had heard it before—I’m in

the habit of telling a story over

and over—and when I came to the part

at the conference, in Moscow,

when Elizabeth Hardwick was telling the story

of Robert Lowell carrying

a flowering branch of a cherry tree

from Boston across the ocean, to lay it

on Pasternak’s grave, her voice tightened,

a moment, her eye and nostril gleamed,

and her hand went into her purse, under

the edge of the table, and came out again,

empty, so I put my hand in my purse,

in my lap, and touched the fold of a clean

hanky, and reached it toward her, under

the polished Russian wood,

even though I saw it was a hanky

my daughter had given me. Miss Hardwick

shook her head, as if to say—

and then my friend spoke up beside me,

a verray, parfit, gentil knyght,

and also an oak on the basepath—he said,

“To say, ‘I don’t want your fucking pity.’ ”

I got it—my stories are always about

myself. Later, I wanted to say,

But her nose was wet,

I wanted to give her what she’d sought, I did not

pity her, I revered her and wanted

to serve her, her fetch-hanky steward,

her Stuart, her Sty-warden, keeper of her

pork-kerchief unlike the one

my girl had embroidered for me in gold script “Mom’s

Snot Rag.” Lowell gave Pasternak

a virgin branch he cradled over

the Atlantic, I wished to give Miss Hardwick

a portion of dignity, as a beggar might

offer a favor to one who, under

the cloak of her disguise, was the queen

of heaven, who for loss of her boy

was weeping. Of course she wouldn’t want

pity from me, I want to say to my