Spring

By Katie Peterson

I have been trying to read King Lear. End up drinking
red wine, and talking about the tropics.
Thought there might be a poem in the play,
maybe the way he talks about the button
on his coat before he dies standing, carrying
the body of the hanged. Maybe the part
where she refuses to bargain and the maps
on the table are redrawn.

***

I am sleeping. Elsewhere, you are finishing Tess
of the D'Ubervilles, those last chapters, before they end
up at Stonehenge, and Angel says to Tess
Sleepy my dear I think you are lying
on the altar. The part where the book lets them
hold each other, without sleepwalking
or lies. Angel has traded in this harp
for a tin kettle and bread. They picnic in a damask-curtained bed,
a fugitive and an accomplice. I may be turning
toward the branch of apple blossom bearing its burden
of the raindrops in an even more buoyant aspect
than the night before. Now you are the caretaker,
finding Tess's fine silk stockings draped
on the damask coverlet in the house they squat in,
giving both of them away.

***

The tree in the side yard not
yet in the kind of flower to release it
and uncover it again. Everything, everything, and before
everything the possibility of something else,
the moment when a moral gets minced by an account
a body makes of any other body,
and time takes place instead of taking time.
Cordelia with the armies of her husband
scouring the unharvested corn of her homeland
for her naked, wandering, delusional father.
Tess at the dairy, good at her job. Angel
in the field, his fingers on the strings of his harp.
You carrying me into a lake in August,
the summer my mother left the earth.

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