Something Resembling a Quilt

I take up watercolor again, mostly clover and rabbits, the occasional horse. Scrounging courage, what else is art? Loneliness was familiar, a whirling spiral from which I could never fully extract myself. Bus rides north, the bus mostly empty, jacking off just to do it, the Vermont landscape luminescent in moonlight and semen. This is your brain on coffee. These are late Jack Gilbert poems, unemotionally challenging. We were scared in the late eighties but much of what we feared did come to pass. Rotting fruit, poisoned trees. As a child the emphasis was on speech which could never contain the wilds I was encountering. Hours would pass firing arrows into the sky, imagining them landing on the moon, and a friend up there gathering them, waiting for me to come and collect. We gather threads and sit by the fire stitching them together into something resembling a quilt. Grandmother goes into the forest and finds a black bear to lay with, and a thousand years later you wake up from a dream of butterflies dreaming they are boys learning not to cry. Such concision for one for whom order was always an enemy. The lowdown, the letter, the lint screen. The cosmos watches itself and its watching folds into itself and we forget this and forget we forget it and still. In a world I am yet constructing, field upon field lit up with Mother’s Anger, I mean Quaker Ladies, I mean bluets, beauty, I mean this light in which it was so easy to get lost.