A History Play
Months later — I’d been cleaning
my desk —
these bits of gold foil spilled to the ground
a second time, five-petaled blossoms of public
gaud
unloosed from the folded playbill as in
August from the heavens at the Swan, Act
Five,
to mark the child Elizabeth’s birth.
The old queen has been put aside (I am not
such a truant as not
to know), the new one’s doomed (the language
I have lived in), the girlchild is herself
a sign of grace
withheld. But look at these sumptuous
velvets with their branchwork and encrusted
pearl,
you’d think the hand of death would be afraid
to strike. That’s wrong. You’d think
that death
had held the needle and dispensed the worm-
wrought thread. The players will be wanting their late
supper soon, while
we — we two and our two girls —
set out across the footbridge on our way back
home.
The waterfowl will be asleep — they’re sleeping
already — their willow-strewn and fecal
island silent
in the summer night. The past that for a moment
turned, backlit, thick
with presence, as though
leading us somehow, in its very
inadvertence giving way to this
slight stench
beneath a moon-washed bridge, the past
that has a place for us will know us by
our scattered
wake. (A strange tongue makes) And morning
meanwhile yet to come (my cause
more strange):
the girls will have hot chocolate with their toast
and eggs. The play? (which we will talk about) Tenacious
in its
praise and fierce in its elisions. So
father, mother (older than the cast-off queen), two
girls: an open book.
And spilling from the binding, gold.
Waterborne: Poems
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