AS HEARTBEAT, AS SIBILANCE - For Patrick - Wendy Donawa

Salt air scouring the cliffs and April sun
on the grassed slope about to burst
into a blue tide of camas washing the wind.
From the corner of your mind’s eye, conjure
the meadow, the women, their digging sticks,
canoes loaded with camas bulbs, the coastal trade.
Meadow, women, canoes, all fade in time’s solvent.

The drought has frightened my rosemary bushes into
indigo astonishment. Press a branch between your palms,
breathe and breathe that aromatic gift before it’s gone.

How briefly the starburst spangle of crabapple blossom
flares, already carpets the path to the lake.

Sift and settle of fog swallows the sun.

All is ghost and patina, rust and tarnish,
And gravity, inexorable, drags roots down into the dark.
But bless the carrion, their work beneath surfaces.
Bless microbes and insects at their intricate tasks, and
small burrowing creatures scuttling from the owl’s claw.

Bless the mutable mutable world where we gather
to laugh and weep over good bread, over dinner’s steam
of cardamom, ginger, cumin rising like a blessing,
and remember how he conducted his poems like music,
taught us cadence as heartbeat, as sibilance.

Alchemy of the always-inadequate word, his sorcery,
words clamber the backbrain from the wordless deep.
The word is never the thing—but we struggle to craft
the startling, the lovely, the ambiguous,
.
and remember how he raised his head slowly from reading
to tell us with kindness, and surgical precision,
how to make our poems better.