I wear the ring my mother bribed my father with,
the bold “P” before they were sweethearts, almost
to sweeten the deal.  He married a woman from
a raging family; my grandmother afraid for him,
never let him forget and he in turn, would never cut

what could be untangled, he would never hurt us
with goodbye.  My brother Paul promised me a sign.
When I dream of him now, he has no wound where 
the cancer snaked through his body, he is strong
and sure in his winter coat. Sometimes, you can come

back whole. The last look he gave me, was that
my knowledge of his dying grieved him, his walk
through that shaken globe alone. His look was like
the silence we would share right before supper, a full
table of plates all proper and settled before my mother’s arm 

would hiss across the table, shattering glass. The look
he had for me in the end was we should wait until later
when we could make all things understood, when
the perilous moment had passed, when the silence 
and almost-forgotten peace would start trembling in.

There’s a name that takes on status after you’re dead,
but alive you walk among the trees, muttering

to yourself.  How bleak, they missed all that:  she believed
that damselflies had a smell, a witch’s cauldron rising over

the lake.  She told them angel wings rattle in the forest.
Her poems were a failed writer’s “mistake.”  Bleak, freak,

chic, oh well.  Oblique, does a poem have a smell?
She could conjure, but never spell. Even her chums

with their cobweb noises. Oy, she heard those voices.
She keeps raking up words but never a pension.  She makes

politicians cringe.  There is an illness for what she has.
Words summon her to the fairy houses. She follows vowels

home like a crusty trail.  She could never write prose
or something dignified.  She had no lineage, her mother was

A plumber, and she has no MFA.  Sssh, you might have guessed,
her best friend says he’s: earnest.  They praise her fast retort,

the word they couldn’t remember never mind utter.
You must know her poems were her children, a sordid clan,

brats behaving badly.  As a last resort, they praised her ability
to respond with this or that quotation.  Left-foot, right-foot,

through the forest.  Aren’t’ you tired of this brief and meager
hobby?  Why couldn’t she be a lawyer and make the trains run.

Gnarly bending limbs, a rough line here or there, a strophe bend
low to the ground.  Only the sky should covet sound.  She praised

real poets, the cardinal’s chatter, she’d hurl words hard
and soft:  Chartreuse, aquamarine, pearl.  A smoldering cinder

became a red thrush about to burst into flame.  Listen,
hummingbird rests on his halo, his laurelled boa of light.

After she died, they said, “even in silence she is articulate.”
Even then, we wish she’d give voice to angels.