The Gatekeeper’s Wife

1
When a man died
My ancestors lit a candle.
It guaranteed eternal memory.

Severed from my ancestors
I light a candle for you
Every night inside a clay house.
Memory is only half the story.

2
You’re always in my mind
Coming and going,
When I plant seedlings,
Helping me turn the earth,
Not saying much but kind.
I’m obviously a stranger.

3
The women were too strong.
You went away with all
Those struggling men.

4
I learned a gesture
From you, a slight
Turning away, a retreat
So little you’d hardly
Believe I noticed.

But it grew in me
Turned strong.
I had a force
Unknown before,
Maybe for evil.

It worked so well
You’d hardly believe
The woman I grew to be
Watching you
Turning away.

5
To whom shall I show
These early fronds?
They were planted
In your memory.

6
We seemed most lighthearted
of companions.
I should have been
What we seemed.
Were you what I thought
We seeemed?

7
How did you say you loved me
For my apple-face?
The apple’s bloom is gone.

8
Sleepless but alive
I talk to you late at night,
In early morning.
Where are you, I say,
Where?

9
Feathering a white thread
Through phantasmal waters
Your boat leaves me small
In dawn’s first light.

10
Your mother said
My eyes were kind.
You never saw eye
To eye with her.

11
Come back, I’ve said
Many times hearing music,
Planting vines, watching
The dying sun.

12
Like an old familiar tree
I’m still here, your branches
Tangled in mine.

13
I call to you awake,
Asleep, still waiting
For an answer.

14
The steps of these poems
Are very small, your footprints
In my mind.

15
Touched by firelight, stretched
Through your young eyes
I found the best of me
The worst.

16
You had no memory, longings, home
No greed, truculence or idleness.
Speechless you mastered language.
Bent to that mastery
Behind a walled world
I stake young plants
In silent furrows
Always listening.

17
Maimed by compassion I
Set myself to learn your script,
Its beauty’s fine edge lost
Passing through my hand.

18
Emptied of pity,
Another homeless dream
Lets you off in the dark
Candid, inflexible as always.
Foolishly I ask again what it was
I thought you wanted.

19
Not a character
But a destiny
Without a character
To endure it.
You can’t revise a book
Severed from the possible
the suitable
the imaginable.
Someone is missing.

20
The gateposts of the house
Tremble, candle falters
a sigh passing
passing over