Sterling Mountain

Which would I choose? This week a mouse-gray stain

That bleach won't cancel is creeping up the side

Of my flea-market mug, crazed Alton ware.

By Friday it should reach the lip. The girl

At lunch with chopsticks, mouthing cottage cheese,

Well knew no meat sufficed. The fact was, one

Did not need food. "This saint, a woman in

India is completely free of vice!

No grain, no meat, no greens, no cup or curd

For sixty years: she gets her victuals from the sun."

I know. But chopsticks? "Td rather have the taste

Of wood than metal on my tongue." And where

Had she wailed once for a brown nipple, I ask-

And think of Madeline; devout not meek; her slurred

Speech; to whom an angel did appear, at home,

In Morrisville, Vermont; in white, two feet

Above the floor, commanding her, now love

And stop the slaughtering of animals.

She would not let her father raise beef cows.

Death pained her. His vice; the massacre; this waste.

Like patches of sky against the green, the holy

Jerseys sway and munch, or chew and bask

Showing their bones like tent poles under tents

Of living leather, buff or chocolate; rich.

That farmer of Stowe who gently whacked his herd

Over Route 100, lungeing slowly;

He saw rain coming, rain in bucketfuls

And did not pause to make us understand

In our cars, in the muggy wet. Then passage; breeze:

A day to be alive! I saw her hand

Pull at the air between us, imploring. Madeline,

One day you'll forget the angel, turning slow

As the herd to the soggy field, fenced off, to stitch

The burdock with teeth ground down to ivory knurls

Friday. Another stifling day. I hold still,

Facing my little window, its little slice

Of air. I bite my beef and want to know,

How will it go with these committed girls?

A LITTLE YARD

Sunlight hugs the walls.

The house is ticking. Winter's

cardiac arrest.

Spring now; you can read

in the garden. Then you use

one sock for bookmark.

From the stump of the

old willow, shoots arch, saffron

stem and leaf. Clare, just

two, sits there in shade, hands in

her lap. "What Clare do!" she cries.

The bumble bee scouts

me; moves on. I rest then, no

flower after all.

You disappear now

to leave just us together.

The violets you

were picking lie on the walk

strewn from here to the back door.

Clare mounts the picnic

table, sprawls on the warm height;

copying the cat.