Those who watched him living didn’t know
how deeply one he was with all of this.
-Rainer Maria Rilke
“The Poet’s Death”
The grackles will continue to rise
in noisy iridescence and you
will never know that I am gone.
This morning, silence greens
along the taut strings of webs
that span the roses at Hotel du Village
like the delicate walking bridges
farther north that divide
two Delawares:
Canal and River.
The roses’ names are fragrant
to the tongue: Pascali, Peace,
Rubiayat, the Hybrid Teas;
Frau Karl Druschki, Perpetual;
and the rampant climber, New Dawn.
In the nearby village, Lumberville,
children gather to dig a hole
to South America. They dip
their bent spoons in the wet grass,
their faces serious as stones.
Now and again, a small girl or boy
will lift a spoon of earth and air
and press it near her lips, or his,
as though the world were sugar-coated
cereal, and as good.
The dark mole-burrows tunnel out
beneath them They form
a crooked half-circle and peer
into the blackness they have made.
The sun lies scintillant inside
the hollows of their spoons.
These photographs will tell you little
of their antics. Or what is on their minds.
(It is not they, but I, who think
of South America, and of Neruda.)
No scent arises from the matte finish
of the rose, nor hum from the cicadas,
silent these long years, who pause
at the base of the catalpa.
How could you know from these
still shots that life teemed —
how it teemed — beneath the lens,
beneath the hands that held it
without rancor, and the heart:
that just beyond the aperture
‘s parameter and out of sight
of you, the children have abandoned
their digging to the star-nosed moles.
A doe lies down to give birth
at the pasture’s edge. Hills rise
like purple martins in the distance.
-1987
Footwork, 1988
- A Day for All Women brochure, 1990
New Hope Gazette, 2001
Julie Cooper-Fratrik received her MFA in poetry from Goddard/VT College; former Poet Laureate of Bucks County; Creative Fellow for two years at the Psychiatric Center of Philadelphia; winner of Achievement Grant from the Leeway Foundation; on the faculty of the Language and Literature Department at Bucks County Community College and served as an Advisor/Advising Specialist.
Poet’s Corner is curated by Bucks County Poet Laureate Emeritus Tom Mallouk and supported by a grant to the Bucks County Herald Foundation made possible by Marv and Dee Ann Woodall.
Thanks to donations and the support of the Woodalls, Poet’s Corner is back for another year. To submit a poem for consideration, email it to Heraldpoetscorner@gmail.com. If the poem has been previously published, please say where it first appeared.
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