Come d’autunno si levan le foglie
l’una appresso de l’altra, fin che ’l ramo
vede a la terra tutte le sue spolglie --Inferno II.112-14
wonder that it’s done. The sister’s legs move in the river and the light around her flaps in the current
on the round wet leaves, green and yellow, white seeds in the air, leaves in the water everywhere, branches, and you think, those are cottonwoods! then
the hawk catches your eye and you see the wind is good up there, and the view, though when you look past the old bluffs
into something else: the father where is he? And the brother, where is he? It does not know
after all these years, for years not a cottonwood among them. Wonder you’ve still got all your fingers and toes, every bare limb and its extremities,
your extremities, and your undue bone-pit, and for what? The father made more
daughters, thrust right through the brother and begat a son. And no, no accidental cause left anyone headless or lipless in any of the likely places, so far as you know, so by extension you are just as likely
—she pounded its bark between an anvil and a rock thinking papyrus thinking book and the skin split wide open—
to have been one of them as to have been you. The sister in the leaves leaves and rows. Read the spines: indeed there was a gate as well as passage. Through
(dig your hole)
me, it said, and now she is very small from here, very far. Wonder it’s done and it does not know the babies
are shadows in the water—find them—tricks of light in the sheer will of the current. Will? You must know. There will be no babies.
*****
Just as in autumn the leaves fall away,
one, and then another, until the bough
sees all its spoil upon the ground
