#sec3

My hands are murder-red. Many a plump head drops on the heap in the basket. Or, ripe to bursting, they might be hearts, matching the blackbird’s wing-fleck.

We’re picking near the shore, the morning sunny, a slight wind moving rough-veined leaves our hands rumple among. Fingers find by feel the ready fruit in clusters. Here and there, their squishy wounds. . . . Flesh was perfect yesterday. . . . June was for gorging. . . . sweet hearts young and firm before decay.

“Take only the biggest, and not too ripe,” a mother calls to her girl and boy, barefoot in the furrows. “Don’t step on any. Don’t change rows. Don’t eat too many.” Mesmerized by the largesse, the children squat and pull and pick handfuls of rich scarlets, half for the baskets, half for avid mouths. Soon, whole faces are stained.

Not a red rose or a satin heart.

I give you an onion. It is a moon wrapped in brown paper. It promises light like the careful undressing of love.

Here. It will blind you with tears like a lover. It will make your reflection a wobbling photo of grief.

I am trying to be truthful.

Not a cute card or a kissogram.

I give you an onion. Its fierce kiss will stay on your lips, possessive and faithful as we are, for as long as we are.

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks, Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge, Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs, And towards our distant rest began to trudge. Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots, But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind; Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time, But someone still was yelling out and stumbling And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.— Dim through the misty panes and thick green light, As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams before my helpless sight, He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

They call it stroke. Two we loved were stunned by that same blow of cudgel or axe to the brow. Lost on the earth they left our circle broken.

One spent five months falling from our grasp mute, her grace, wit, beauty erased. Her green eyes gazed at us as if asking, as if aware, as if hers. One night she slipped away; machinery of mercy brought her back to die more slowly. At long last she escaped.

Sundays too my father got up early and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold, then with cracked hands that ached from labor in the weekday weather made banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking. When the rooms were warm, he’d call, and slowly I would rise and dress, fearing the chronic angers of that house,

looking out 

at the next block at the curtains on the next block

at shadows opening cupboards and closing them, noiselessly  at housewives washing dishes framed by socks on window grilles at wooden slots for air-cons at rusty holders for washing poles

is to feel as if  one is viewing a wall at a columbarium