Piñata Grove
Then I would come at once my love with love Bringing to wasted areas the sight
of butterfly and swan and turtle dove
Eavan Boland
I should make coffee, make do
with what’s left of the night,
and stop thinking about those baby frogs
popcorning the forest floor
so that each step we took started a kind of polka
dance-hall of bodies, frantic
to the beat of our big human feet on the late summer ground.
I confuse that day with pecan picking
and the way you’d javelin
the broom handle into the charted sky
until pecan rain surrounded us
and we followed that brindled falling
knowing that later would mean pie.
Tonight there’ll be no relief
map marking every polka-dotted
trail we ever walked, every storm
we weathered, and what’s left is the nature
channel where even the wolverine’s fierce love
has to hold tenderness, where even the weather’s at a loss.
Am I to make of these images some kind of design
pointed and sharp as the teeth of some predator?
Why take all this terror to make us run
back for what we love?
Always, in the Serengeti of a moment: a gazelle, her young,
the threat of some wordless okay from the grasses sssshhhh
danger that whispery strikes fast as a mama gazelle charges in,
and the snowglobe of who we were is turned
upside down, so that even false
blizzards, even frogs fall up
in a season that, like the logic of love, defies gravity,
sputters out a curtain of moving Braille that if we could make it out
would say nothing less than this:
I would come at once my love, my love,
wear the cruel lightning of their jaws as a necklace.