For WS Merwin

A pile of windfall apples becomes 
a fox lying nose in tail, a sentinel for memory, 
as the late sun turns its fur into rusty barbed wire. 

We’ve traveled for days. I’ve told you before 
about these mountain roads. About the man 

who lived in a shack who borrowed water, 
fried me a plate of catfish for my Halloween 
treat. I called him Uncle Charley, but he wasn’t 

any relation of mine. The night we got caught swimming, 
there was another who wore a hood, leafy and torn, 

who watched with particular interest while I wrung 
out my undershirt, scrubbed my skin pink before we 
sat down to supper and I was forced to eat what 

was good enough for them. What I thought I had left, 
I kept finding again. A pile of hoods in our attic left 

behind by the man and bleached white as bones. Clippings 
of the pineys and the baby who had been stolen. 
We find a fox lying nose to tail, a sentinel for memory, 

sun glinting its fur rusty and I tell you, with lips bruised 
like wind fall apples, I can’t stay here. Me with my old 

coat mended so neatly where I had sewn secrets into its 
pockets. Me in my little girl’s voice who tells 
you a story with lips that are only slightly torn.

When my skin no longer fits, I carry a bag of bones 
to the edge of the ocean. I steal the breath from a gull.
On the beach a mother bends to help a young boy 
bundle up a baby cormorant. I watch as they cradle it,
 
hold a wing into the air and fling it eastward.   
I thought you could teach me how to fly.  I made you 
out of sand dunes and red clay. My husband sleeps. 
I conjure up you, Merwin, and you, Merlin.  
 
Palm trees and ancient words, a black cauldron 
of seawater and fire. You spread the fan of the cormorant's
wing and arrange your pigments and brushes, stroke 
 
each feather with woodland brown or green.  
I feel my skin begin to loosen. I pick away the lice, 
curl back the sclerotic welt of paint.