Or make them whole again.

It can't, or won't.

And it is late for blessings: All night

I've held a woman who,

Tomorrow, I will not want to see again, & who,

Tomorrow, probably will feel the same

For me. And so at last the two of us

Will have something in common:

A slight embarrassment, or,

Someday in winter, passing on a street,

A quick, amused glance before

We turn away.

I don't expect much anymore; or else

That city is so far away by now it seems

Made of great light, & distance,

Even though it was, mostly, only a house

Like any other, lit at dinnertime

By human speech, the oldest of stories; something

In common. I remember now,

After scolding him,

The precise & careful way

My two-year-old son once offered me

The crust of his own bread, holding it out

So solemnly, as if it mattered, holding it

With great care.

THE QUILT

“He had stopped believing in the goodness of the world.”

—Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady

I think it is all light at the end; I think it is air.

Those fields we drove past, turning to mud in April,

Those oaks with snow still roosting in them. Towns so small

Their entire economy suffered if a boy, late at night,

Stole the bar's only cue ball.

In one of them, you bought an old quilt, which, fraying,

Still seemed to hold the sun, especially in one

Bright corner, made from what they had available in yellow

In 1897. It reminded me of laughter, of you. And some woman

Whose faith in the goodness of the world was

Stubborn, sewed it in. “There now,” she might as well

Have said, as if in answer to the snow, which was

Merciless. “There now,” she seemed to say, to

Both of us. “Here's this patch of yellow. One field gone

Entirely into light. Good-bye…” We had become such artists

At saying good-bye; it made me wince to look at it.

Something at the edge of the mouth, something familiar

That makes the mouth turn down. An adjustment.

It made me wince to have to agree with her there, too,

To say the day itself, the fields, each thread

She had to sew in the poor light of 1897,

Were simply gifts. Because she must be dead by now, &

Anonymous, I think she had a birthmark on her cheek;

I think she disliked Woodrow Wilson & the war;

And if she outlived one dull husband, I think she

Still grew, out of spite & habit, flowers to give away.

If laughter is adult, an adjustment to loss,

I think she could laugh at the worst. When I think of you both,

I think of that one square of light in her quilt,

Of women, stubborn, believing in the goodness of the world.

How next year, driving past this place, which I have seen

For years, & steadily, through the worst weather, when