Signatures

It would have made no difference who commanded us in
ppp those first hours . . . .
-veteran, invasion of Normandy, 1944

That was no country for old women . . . someone from D-Day
at the redgold turn of the party
recites his line of Yeats with a sex-change
someone already stricken
in his urethra pppp rising four times nightly

Went through that and still despises . . .

Here an old woman's best country is her art
or it's not her country
Here the old don't pity the old
As when young we scale our rock face
relentless, avid

looking sometimes back at the whole terrain:

-those scrapings on the rocks
are they a poet's signature?
a mother's who tried for all her worth to cling
to the steep pp with the small soft claws gripping her back?

1998


From FOX (Norton, 2001)