for Meridel LeSueur* 

1
The cold egg of the snow cracks open,
broadens into chunks of fog.
10 A.M. and the street corner is invisible.
I turn on the electric heater, listen to Casals,
watch the branches like thin asparagus stalks
shrouded and growing under water.
Something lives here bigger than my skin,
larger even than the old man Pablo bent over his bow,
the old man Pablo brushing his quick strokes on paper,
the old man Pablo writing his last poem from a hospital bed.

At the trial they are talking about death.
The old Indians have faces that crease in all directions,
crisscrossed patches of flesh, long black hair.
Hundreds are indicted.
The young prosecutor wears a sweater under his jacket to keep off the cold.
And the deaths at Wounded Knee hover somewhere in that dark fog.
Nothing is lost,
nothing disappears. The murders dissolve and then re-form into 
     something new.

2
Night now.
Quarter moon behind trees.
Down the block the yellow-lemon light is always there.
At sunset the last of the fog was caught, pink, like a glaze separated from 
     its pot.
Today in Spain two anarchists from the mountains garroted:
a leather collar with a nail sticking out is placed around the neck and
     tightened.
The moon clears the trees now and hangs free in the sky, bodiless.

3
Three days ago I bought a Zuni bracelet, thought about it
a long time, wore it around the shop and shook my wrist like a dancer
trying on new shoes. There are small pieces of turquoise and coral,
bits of the mastodon world like a speck caught in the eye.
Vision of the small, tears from another culture set in silver.
The silver in the bracelet shivers in sunlight, glows in candlelight;
a white arc of music for the eye,
vibrations scattered like small campfires along a beach.
I see cello
phosphorescence, curved fingers along the bow,
an old man’s notations thrown back over his shoulder.


*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meridel_Le_Sueur