Blue Vox

"The poet doesn't so much disappear into the poem as become the poem. It is a concentration of faculties, of everything you are or hope to be, and at that moment you have a focus not only on your conscious life, but your unconscious world, and it is as much an expression of your whole being as is conceivable."
— S. Kunitz, The Wild Braid, p. 98



Blue Vox

Dwelt in a shed
by a cabin
on a cliff
by that river
pierced with songs of blackbirds
hanging sideways on cattails

She came in a brown cloak
fourteen years old
disguised as an old woman
clothed in brown
homespun
At daybreak
she knocked on the brown
shed door
black iron hinges
wood scratched light in places
sturdy despite years of use
They had come before, these leavers of "babies"
but in two hundred years they had seldom left humans
Brought under cover of darkness,
wrapped in blankets
they had brought
honor, pride, purity, truth
He never asked questions
Always cared for his charges like children
when cities burned
or upended tables and broad red tempers
arms like limbs of oak and
shouting like thunder
threatened to destroy them
They always came at night
edge of dawn or
just past dusk
when in summer the frogs'
throaty longing swelled upon
the river
She brought her voice that night
when Venus hung pure in azure sky
knocked and left
a swaddled parcel crying
The note said:
I don't know when I'll be back. Please care for my child.
She departed into the blackness of the wood
Of course they came for him—her—it—
They came on horseback and at
the sound of them
Blue Vox carried the beloved to the river,
set the child in a basket,
pushed the basket
out from the reeds,
into the current:
You'll be safer out there.

© April 2009