A rain of lemons, 1946 (Excerpt from The Custom of Killing Rabbits)

 

We were gone when the earthquake hit.

Father had caged the rabbits, wrapped our glass in shawls and

Taken the meat from the hooks in the rafters.

 

The warning was a witch’s rattle,

Her voice cast like fallen rock across the dell.

She sang thunder and it fell beneath her;

 

The first earth, stone, leaf.

We saw it tumble and packed our stockings

While the priest rang bells to drown her counting.

 

La notte, La notte, La luna, she comes.

She sang us to the orchards of Castellano,

Beckoning soprano, reading the height of sun against mountain.

 

Only the priest remained by midnight,

Clutching psalms and rocking when the mountain woke

shaking roof and shingle into his lap.

 

It rained lemons until morning.

We stood in the orchard and collected the fruit

To seed new groves among the ghosts of our village.

Lucy

 

There is a dead star named Lucy

whose core is 2,500 miles of diamond

 

Just imagine how many fingers you could fit in its heart.

 

Soon to be kitchen wives

with pre-pregnant abdomens

dream float through atmosphere

and stick their ring fingers in it

like they are checking pie.

 

They do not enjoy waking.

 

There are miners in Alberta

who have built slingshots from maples.

It takes ten men to load the boulder

then fire westward

and imagine the rock

into a vacuum of light.

 

So far they have brought down

the neighbour's antenna, two deer and a wolf.

 

Three billion years ago

a neighbour of Lucy

fell to Sierra Leone.

It was split by gravity,

the crown throttled into the ocean

the base sent into a cataclysm of trees.

 

Divers search pearl beds for the comet

they sometimes return with hands full of stones.

 

Crustaceans once made their homes

from these fragments

binding sediment grains

from the ocean floor.

They were amoebic,

born from single cells and yet able

 

to judge the clarity, carat and cut.

 

Rockland

 

I am with you in Rockland

 

beneath skies that break

like your mother once broke the china

 

launching Aunt Mary's porcelain

through the shut window

 

red borscht sunrise, yogurt cloud

she painted lunch over the kitchen

 

beet juice in hair, teeth purple

shaking with currents of laughter.

 

You never saw it coming:

that puberty, comedy, tragedy

 

could arrive in the same bowl of soup.

 

I am with you in Rockland

 

beneath rivers of your body

that ebb, flow; turn my bone

 

to sand. Run over me.

Tell her story in stream.

 

First came the inability to stew beets

then a habit of nudity, a concern for the blood

 

of strawberries. In sleep

she wove like an eel, spilling from the bed.

 

But there was laughter; she would kiss you,

flip pancakes - here. Oatmeal. Your favourite.

 

I am with you in Rockland

 

where you wake me, dusted with flour.

There is sugar burning,

 

breakfast is ready. Eat. Have another.

You bend down, kiss the flat of my nose.

 

Lover, patient, daughter. Here: the hospital illuminates itself,

 

we both hear your mother's call.