for Pascale
 
 
In her last year
when the canal opened
 
and the ground gave up
its black swans,
 
she was the one calling them –
channeling their light through the soles
 
of her feet. Their hard red bills
made of clay – bugle cries
 
moving through her like a child
falling from a cliff. She saw faces
 
in the water (the tall plane trees asking
to be saved), all of them soft
 
at the mouth. Wild yellow irises
pushed up like confession.
 
They seem cudgeled
by the wind, or hypnotized
 
by their own reflections, bending
too close to the muckish
 
river. What did she write, then tuck
in the underwing? Sundown
 
was a hermit’s candle, a golden rope
around her waist. There’s something
 
she tried to say – the wheat of Mary’s hair,
her tongue pistilled with roots. What the soil
 
won’t tell, but knows like a bulb,
a soul awaiting another life. She ate
 
all the irises until her belly bulged
weighted down in her castle of water