Excerpt from Letters to a Stranger

Luncheon with the Hangman

I remember the field of snow
Where I cut the throat of the servant girl.
I left her in that rumpled meadow.

Negligence became habitual.
I grew accustomed to vulnerability.
After the minor fractures of April,

Slow convalescence, a montage of sky.
The village clock, punctual as a cricket,
Tapped the penetrable gray

I mistook for sheep, a woolly light.
I decapitated the schoolmarm after a light supper
And left her head on a salad plate.

You tell me surrender is unconditional.
Lead me to the marketplace full of this good beer.
I’ll swing like the tongue of a bell.

Waterlilies

Late summer. This morning, before I woke,
Waterlilies broke open,
Supposing themselves out of the sheer dark.

I walk at the pond’s edge. Leaves have grown
Bitter with age in the shallow wet.
Bronze is asserting itself in the flat green.

All morning these petals come up white
As my sister, flowering in childbirth
In the east room where they keep the windows shut;

And the bed is a pondful of lilies suddenly budded
In a blacked out room in late summer.
The sun rises by itself at the iron bedstead.

I watch the pond losing its brandy color
Where lilies bob in the last heat of summer,
Duplicating themselves on the stone-cold mirror;

The house rises in a thick welter of trees
Out of the morning light. My sister
Wakes in the dark. Her arms are full of lilies.