Things not explicitly remembered
I.
Between the two waters,
I hear its murmur the night long
after the storm.
Or birds
or a woman from her face
we must recall: We are.
(And this child the earth contends.)
How can I return? We wake again.
Of trees in the rain,
we see as our bodies.
When blooming ends and through the petals
and when we listen,
as something in a flower,
afterlight
to become the day.
This is more than an ecstatic song,
but tell her
we sat all night waiting.
II.
Again, bathing in the fruit house.
To see different forms of people,
that's a token.
Wherever your people live
east of you,
north of you, it's the way they travel.
"When I was polluted in blood,
then you passed over me."
I know these signs,
as mandrake grows at the foot
of a gallows.
"Same with a woman," she said.
"All women come thirteen times--
the Flower's doubled up extra one month."
She used to see babies on the wall terrible.
The tub warmed by the sun.
III.
Lack of rain made leaves fall
early this year.
(Blackbirds sang all night.)
Nearer a mild climate,
take a word, hummed
and make the river flow.
(She learned her letters off the sides
of railway cars.)
And under my hand,
one of her handkerchiefs, still boxed,
dingy in the folds.
(Here is the railroad bridge.)
You will also see weathervanes,
the hatpins, cufflinks,
by the garden gate once buried in mud.
His initial in gold,
for a long time now,
of water this morning.
IV.
What anyone who gazed there saw
at the mouth of the river:
sinking purple in the night.
I prayed hard against it.
Their boats stranded in sea-weed
where meadows recede through planes
of heat and pure distance.
The signs in the rain, I listened.
It is no longer possible to say,
she pushes hard against cotton.
Rain dreams the sounds
One expects her to be beautiful,
there, years after.
(I knew it would come this way.)
To bite the tongue
and let them fall to each other
before and after all advent.
The salt that seems a sign
vanishes.
I think of you (when summer ends)
thicket with no birdsong
and trees that call from further off.
And if we turn toward the whitened road,
there is a sort of blue
shading out of the fences now.
V.
River water gives off reflections,
but you will not view the sea.
In spite of morning outside
and yet morning comes
as a cold wind along the ground.
He fells
trees. Green of plants,
so may the earth.
The old indian rule:
(The timber was yours as far as
you could throw an axe.)
Insects repeat in his song.
Thunder rolls
and, even so,
it is a sound that integrates
the whole of the atmosphere.
Voice above......Voice below
narrow and deep vertical.
I know what he sees and hears.
He sings. But is it vertical only?
These are things not explicitly remembered:
the woman's name, the exact location
of her grave.
It is a translation of her into landscape,
as blackbirds fixed in white branches.
Jacobs home page
River geography at first hand
An error in geography
The timber they kept back
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