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Stanley Plumly -- from The Marriage in the Trees


Souls of Suicides as Birds

Because of his fierce red-orange hair,
which he hated and threatened to dye,
and did, on more than one occasion,
leaving the half-look of his head
strangely mottled, as if he had survived
scarlet fever, which, in his embarrassment,
he sometimes claimed he had, and because
he spoke and acted with a certain insect
abruptness yet showiness in spite of his
childish size, more diminutive each year,
and because Timothy is a grass, Tim the
dimuinuation, he's become an American Redstart,
demonstrative at the tiptop of branches,
che-wee, che-wee, che-wee. Linda Mannus,
whose intelligent high-wire crisis voice
piqued everyone's angst, even at twelve,
is a Chipping Sparrow, heard as well in
the backyard as among the orchard cages.
She took poison, then a razor, then ran --
Timothy Cotrell used all twenty gauges
of his gun. The farmer Elifritz drove
his tractor through a worn out wall
of his barn, thereby piercing his throat
with old wood, and therefore is a warbler,
Black-throated Blue, who loves the swampy
interior, the dense scrub undergrowth.
Jack Butz, whose Vietnam wound was total,
like a lightning scar, lived for as long
as is possible in Piqua, Ohio, and be alive;
and Jerry Hart, star athlete, died of Aids:
one is Purple, one a Boat-tailed Grackle.

And when Raymond Baker flew with his Ford
Fairlane through the barrels and signs of
detour, planing his head through the wind-
shield, he became a Swift, able to dive
down chimneys and vector a straight line
of the invisible air like an arrow aimed
at silence. And the two sisters, Alma and
Kay, each impregnated by their father,
transpired for a while as Whippoorwills,
then Doves, but found real joy as Thrushes,
hermetic, unadorned, but adored at evening.
Kay found Alma hanging and followed ....
These friends from school -- and there are more,
doubtless, I don't know about and others,
almost subtle, who crafted deaths too natural,
none of whom made it out of their thirties
or forties, none of them murdered, none
of them victims of streetfire or planes,
sticks and stones or drugs, none of them missing
persons, all of them Starlings or the Siren
noise high in the Tulip Poplars ...


Lazarus at Dawn

Your whole life you are two with one taken
away. The inadequate air and fire,
the inadequate joy, the darknesses
of the room so gathered at the window
as to fly, wing on wing on wing open
against the glass, opening and closing,
bone, blood and wrist. But nothing happens but
exhaustion and evidence of the eyes,
the red-gold cloud-break morning beginning

with the objects that floated in the dark
draining back to the source, floating back to
the surface tension of things, those objects
struck the way the first light starts suddenly,
then slowly in relief across the room,
the window's shadow garden comes back one
last time once more from the leaves. Waking now,
the door half-open, open, the doorway's
blindness of blackness silence to be filled.

A man was sick, a sickness unto death.
All he wanted to do was to lie down,
let the light pick him apart like the dust.
He wrapped himself, in his mind, in his own
absence. He did not want to hear the rain,
with its meaning, nor the moment after
rain, nor the sound of Jesus weeping, nor
the dreaming, which is memory, though he
lay a long time cold, head against the stone.

You see the wind passing from tree to tree,
thousands of green individual leaves
silver and fluid at the surfaces,
the long nothing narrative of the wind.
The wind is the emptiness and fullness
in one breath, and the holding of that breath,
restlessness and stillness of the spirit.
You see your dead face in the gray glass close,
and see that it is already too late,

that death's blood nakedness clothed white is smoke,
the father standing in the doorway white,
whom you see in part, the way the morning
gathering is part in the slow degrees
of rectitude, a kind of twilight dawn.
Nothing is said, though he knows you love him.
Nothing is said, though you know he loves you.
Longing, as a sickness of the heart, is
invisible, incurable, endless.


Red Somersault

The night my mother died
she held on to me to keep
her body upright over depths
above which lying down means
falling. Outside, the crystal,
skeletal snow was falling,
though sometimes, in the wind
that starts from the ground,
it would suddenly rise.
The sky had disappeared,
while fifteen floors below
carlights under streetlights
slowed. Then midnight
into early morning passed
blood through the heart
over and over and windows
turned so sheer they seemed
to open on the cold. Air
in the room was glistening,
yet her gray eyes kept
their clarity and her three-
quarters-of-century face
its comprehension. Air,
she said, was the angel.
Outside, the white constructions
of the snow, building at
different speeds, falling from
different heights, replaced
the shapes of things with
ghosts: her snow-covered
hands holding fast to the fear
that she was alone and without
death would end up one of those
women on the street who
in weather sleeps in cars.