Original Fire Read Online Free PDF Page B

cries of the earth
    and wonder why everything comes down to this:
    The days pile and pile.
    The bones are too few
    and too foreign to know.
    Mary, you do not belong here at all.
     
    Sometimes I take back in tears this whole town.
    Let everything be how it could have been, once:
    a land that was empty and perfect as clouds.
    But this is the way people are.
    All that appears to us empty,
    We fill.
    What is endless and simple,
    We carve, and initial,
    and narrow
    roads plow through the last of the hills
    where our gravestones rear small
    black vigilant domes.
    Our friends, our family, the dead of our wars
    deep in this strange earth
    we want to call ours.

Shelter
    My four adopted sons in photographs
    wear solemn black. Their faces comprehend
    their mother’s death, an absence in a well
    of empty noise, and Otto strange and lost.
    Her name was Mary also, Mary Kröger.
    Two of us have lived and one is gone.
    Her hair was blond; it floated back in wings,
    and still you see her traces in the boys:
    bright hair and long, thin, knotted woman’s hands.
    I knew her, Mary Kröger, and we were bosom friends.
    All graves are shelters for our mislaid twins.
     
    Otto was for many years her husband,
    and that’s the way I always thought of him.
    I nursed her when she sickened and the cure
    fell through at Rochester. The healing bath
    that dropped her temperature, I think, too fast.
    I was in attendance at her death:
    She sent the others out. She rose and gripped my arm
    and tried to make me promise that I’d care
    for Otto and the boys. I had to turn away
    as my own mother had when her time came.
    How few do not return in memory
    and make us act in ways we can’t explain.
    I could not lie to ease her, living, dying.
    All graves are full of such accumulation.
     
    And yet, the boys were waiting in New York
    to take the first boat back to Otto’s folks
    in Germany, prewar, dark powers were at work,
    and Otto asked me on the westbound bus
    to marry him. I could not tell him no—
    We help our neighbors out. I loved him though
     
    It took me several years to know I did
    from that first time he walked in to deliver
    winter food. Through Father Adler’s kitchen,
    he shouldered half an ox like it was bread
    and looked at me too long for simple greeting.
    This is how our live complete themselves,
    as effortless as weather, circles blaze
    in ordinary days, and through our waking selves
    they reach, to touch our true and sleeping speech.
     
    So I took up with Otto, took the boys
    and watched for them, and made their daily bread
    from what the grocer gave them in exchange
    for helping him. It’s hard to tell you how
    they soon became so precious I got sick
    from worry, and woke up for two months straight
    and had to check them, sleeping, in their beds
    and had to watch and see each breathe or move
    before I could regain my sleep again.
    All graves are pregnant with our nearest kin.

The Slow Sting of Her Company
    Otto brought one sister from that town
    they never talk about. His father shook
    one great red fist, a bludgeon, in the air
    behind them as dry sparks released the wheels.
    I pictured him, still standing there, now shrunk—
    a carved root pickling in its own strong juice.
    They speak his name and wipe it from their lips.
    Proud Hilda hides his picture
in a drawer with underskirts.
     
    Tall Hilda sniffed and twisted that gold chain
    my Otto gave her. Other, lesser men
    have gifted her with more impressive things.
    She keeps them in a drawer with towels and sheets.
    I came upon a sentimental locket,
    embossed with words, initials interfixed
    within the breasts of dour, molting swans.
    Proud Hilda cracked it open,
smiled, and clicked it shut.
     
    How many men had begged her heavy hand
    I do not know. I think I loved her too
    in ways that I am not sure how to tell—
    I reached one day to gather back her hair:
    wild marigold. I touched one hidden ear
    and drew my fingers, burning, from the stone
    that swung a cold light from the