The Wichita Poems

This is Maple Grove
and no one comes here much —
a few kids now and then
or from the new
neighboring apartments
some retired fireman perhaps
to exercise his dogs.
No one seems to mind.
They bury now across the road.

Well, this spring, after months
of pacing in your room
or staring absently
at books of letters saved
or simply never sent
or looking simply
at whatever monuments
of absence or decay
the day might balance nicely
on the back of a hand,
you’ve come once more
to Maple Grove, reading out
as absently as the names
you’d memorized last fall
and are vaguely pleased
that things look much the same
that the same few graves,
the smaller headstones
near the fence, remain
decked sadly out
in last year’s green
and plastic evergreens
and that the mausoleums
still manage somehow to suggest
a small grimy compromise
between an old unhappy school
and its adjacent church.

Somewhere beyond the masikeyns
fluttering somewhere
over the used up place
where the monuments
have settled, tilting
oddly in the weeds,
two kites are rising
are floating like the moons
you might imagine
keep rising still
over childhood’s leveled
and desremembered town
the silly moons of love
moons of that moonlit
and leafy entrophy
of random stones
towards which the blank
white and real moon
or even love itself
so irretrievably depend.
Still, how colorfully they speak
our need for flags
bright signs and metaphor —
for such simple
celebrations of the weather
as the forever hovering
and impossible angle
might afford those saints
like bald Jerome
who, though sick
and altogether weary,
nonetheless sat quiet
in his wilderness,
neither wary of the lion
nor bruised enough
with the wisdom of stones.