in that bucket, in that bird

- for poor, poor Anna

But there is clouded indifference 
there, in that cooling cup of coffee.
For you, I’ve asked it if it remembers
dark carriages, the way it once splashed
up and down in perfect syncopation
with the clicking of ferrous horse hooves
in some time we maybe never were.

A memory reminds me that we have 
not yet met.  It is 1748, so I pick up my 
pace, rushing to write you, again, on the 
shores of some island whose name has 
changed or will by 2004.  In the distance, 
waves gossip with the deaf obelisks along
the shoreline.

I only write you, this time, because perhaps
the gossip of the sea has feathered an awkward twilight
across this crowded sky.  And, yes, to warn you:
the roadway back to the village, back to the angular
roofs, to the gables holding first rain like settling tears, will
only take you somewhere different, a place 
you have already grown weary of.

The little girl cradling the dead dove walked 
there too, damning the royal falconers, damning
the high walls of the throne, churning herself
forward through centuries as she took that
one, silent, planned step into the open eye
of an old well.  Perhaps you’ve heard the 
miller’s men calling through the hollows of 
rotting trees as you were out walking.
Do not go to them.

Perhaps the fall did not kill her.  Instead,
she bit into bitter silence when the men called her
sacred name down into the gut of the earth
and after nightfall, when she opened her arms and pushed
her two blue hands up to the single circle of purple sky,
the bird lit off for the failing moon like the quick, tan arms and legs
of children after fireflies in early evening.
In this village the long morning grain
is grinding and I am still writing you 
as a fresh pail of pale water is dragged up from a 
soon dry well.  In that bucket is a dead bird.
In that bird is everything we know.