Woman Song



I wouldn’t know how to greet you
My knees are roughened
by kneeling before you
I wish that I could turn
away from your touch
I want to know your distance
to know distance.

I know only desire
wanting
and waiting
I walk in darkness
the hot sun is memory
waiting your coming
but distance is too great
and the ancient vessel
is lost.

I hear the trumpeting
of the long-necked swan
but where you go
I cannot follow
I have no offering
You are resting
on another island.

Your silence
betrays me

Count ghosts
I count my ghosts in blood
ancestral strengths
disastrous and delicate traces
of grandmothers from a hundred generations

Count ghosts
count wild men who sailed
Atlantic storms
or far around the Cape

Count ghosts of farm wives
alone on prairie emptiness
weeping memory
of distant homes
and bright rose gardens

Ghosts of a peasant past
blend with proper merchant greed
poverty’s pain or singer’s
gentle seed, all blended here
in voices, love or fear
I carry with me
my own ancestral collection

Mist comes and goes on a mountain
Peter

Mist comes and goes
I hear your name
so foreign
the name you gave me
I still bear
and place
beside my fathers'.

We lived
together
in that tiny house
I learned
your touch
and what it meant
to be a woman
wife.

And you, I think
a tenderness
you had not known.

I waited
in the afternoons
for you
for your stories
for wild new words
that you found
in your language
in your many languages.

You called me
Francesca
And I became
Someone
I did not know