MADELINE DEFREES

The poetry of earth

                                    is never dead, as John Keats
testified before they lowered him to earth.
At 25, racked lungs deprived of air, he died
in Rome—1821—a world away from
Fanny Brawne, his stone nameless as he wished.
Already the great odes stood,
his testament:

                                    To Autumn, On a Grecian Urn, and
To a Nightingale.  If Conrad Aiken’s
Stars… Pale in a saffron mist and seem to die,
they only seem because the eye
retains the afterglow as if the stars
were flowers—Roethke’s Cut stems struggling
to put down feet,

                                    a resurrection Bishop
understands:  the iceberg cuts its facets from within.
Like jewelry from a grave.  At Keats’s tomb
his lines echo and reecho, alive and
resonant as voices from a cave.  All through the dark
Merwin’s night wind looks
for the grief it belongs to.

                                    On precious stone, not
far from the Tiber, Keats ordered this
inscription—for his brief life, the perfect
metaphor—Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water.
Now water carries it to the farthest shore.

—from Spectral Waves

After a tearful morning

                                    I take myself to the backyard
to drown my woes in a pool of sweat, a cure
as old as Eden.  Hours undoing
the work of sun and rain in my garden:  8-inch grasses
choking out tomatoes.  Miles of
wild mustard running amok in the winter squash.
Slugs       earwigs        snails

                                    making a lacework of lettuce.
I drag the beanstalk ladder from the general
clutter in my garage to bring down
Blue Lake beans, stretching like Jack to retrieve them.
I count on their magic to help me
steal a bag of gold from the ogre.  When that wide
white road unspools before me,

                                    I follow it to a
threshold.  Here in the heart of danger, risking my
life in the oven, I count on
the ogre’s wife to weave a pattern of lies
to sustain me.  After a dull interlude when words
desert me, I manage to steal
the ogre’s hen and the single

                                    word that summons her
golden eggs.  Not content with one theft, I steal
his magic harp as well, command it
to sing away sadness, trusting the spell of music,
rescue of words returned
in the pale green light I have
opened my eyes to for decades.

—from Spectral Waves