two bits

Two bits of rcent writing. I’ve posted this one here before, but it sprouted a second verse. (Each verse attacked me after a different row on the same canal. I’m thinking maybe I’ll be given a third verse before I leave, for early summer. Maenads, maybe.)

Spring on the canal
Persephone proceeds, neither heralded by horns
Nor striding a red carpet like the royalty she is.
Scarcely noticed, she drifts amid a green mist
Glimpsed through grey and winter-knotted boles
Bedecked in cherry blossom, adorned with wild fern
On her sweet inexorable return to the upper world.

Persephone’s whisper swells to Maia’s song;
New growth quickens, like a green flame
Licking up trunks and along branches.
Buds swell and burst into blossom;
Cherry and dogwood riot among the sober oaks,
While aspens in unseasonable white
Shiver in still-cool breezes.

My uncle is doing well, and in fact is on a short trip to Williamsberg right now, his first travel since the whole chemo ordeal began. I think it’s his first since visiting us a year ago, which is an unheard-of gap for him. He’s still symptom free, and is bothered much less by the current chemo regime than the last one. Still, they don’t know yet if it’s working at all. Dad, on the other hand is in the hospital. they haven’t figured out what the cause is, but seem to be treating it as a small stroke. That’s what this is about, and about trying not to think of the inevitable, but it won’t make much sense unless you’re familiar with Dorothy L. Sayers’s Nine Tailors.

Bell-Shaped Space

When you stand in a belfry,
With the bells stilled
And the ropes looped aside
With the dust undisturbed in the corners
And the smell of ancient wood,
And you touch one bell with a tentative hand
(Carefully, with respect for the weight of its years)
On the edge of hearing
There is – not quite a sound –
A space set aside
For the bell’s toll to fill.

I have that same space
Shaped in my head these days
Waiting for the bells to ring
Nine times, twice over
Eighteen tailors make two men.