is undone by spring light, which loves her.
If
the world
came from stellar intercourse, two stars bathing together
and spinning us off, that's why we're spun off
in the morning, unmooring and drifting away, casting underwater
for the dream's biggest fish. Out in the glossy day,
sometimes the three dimensions detach, a circus family
jumping from each other's shoulders, and what's left are life–
echoing surfaces , glorified like the lake by a prostrate sun
whose back you ride, casting beneath the lid of imagination
for why we're here. It's simple,
inventing difficulty. With any five lines on the white page
of morning, I can fashion a skeleton of my world : a woman
fishing. The grasp of tedium and miracles keeps her from becoming
a let-go balloon, keeps her inventing both path
and obstacle toward a reunion with happiness .
Julie Agoos
LUNAR ECLIPSE AT A NEW ENGLAND FUNERAL
At the funeral, we sing a hymn
she sang for us so often, that our voices
in the cold church are cloudy, and tentative:
concentrating so hard on death,
we can almost hear her as the organ softens.
Then in the silence after the last prayer,
we whisper our way past the coffin leaving flowers
as if we could obscure that heavenly image.
We sigh the long way to the graveyard through tall grass ;
along the ground, our stilt shadow bodies
slide .off into the blackberry bushes . We can hear
the toads and crickets passing over them,
