From the Window of My Home-Town Hotel
On the lee slope of the small coastal mountainwhich conceals the sun the first hour after its rising,in the dry,mist of the heat is seething like dustleft over from an earlier world.A crow with a swimmer’s shoulders worksthe air. And a little bird flies up into atree and closes its wings, like a blossomfolded up into a bud again.In the distance is a very old pine, now sparseand frail as hand-painted on a platewashed for a hundred years. And the bellin the tower, which rings the hours—the rhythmof its intervals is known to me.I am forgetting my mother. It well may besome fur of her marrow is in a steeptrough of fog aslant in a gougeof these hills—her bones were pestled in this city,down the street from this hotel,after her face had been rendered backto her God. I don’t sense her here.At moments I picture my young self,that long, narrow chin pointed likea mosquito probiscus. She knew this place.This is where she saw the grindings of thefemurs and ulnas breathing in the air,and the crow’s work by which it earnedits eggs, and where a songbird seemeda flower again, and saw a treeworn away by human eating,and the double notes of several metals’struck reasonance waiting in what hadbeen them, before they were belled from the earth.She wanted what was not there, and she saw and heard it.
