Jane Mead

Gypsum When You Arrive

For just as there is alabaster
in the market-place there is
the remembrance of gypsum

in the sun,--when the body
watches. If you listen
you will turn toward a remote

and ancient calling: alien:
you survive: beyond the brownish air
around the globe another

streaked sky waits--as if for
a flickering-of-wings it cannot
contain. As if for the flinch

in your voice. Which it can.

Before the First Errand 8

(--which was her life on earth)
there were the practice moments:
the stars from no perspective,

the stockyards in winter. Thud
of mallet on skull--from no
perspective. In this way

she came to sense a manner of
being she wasn't there for:
the wide burst of pigeons--

at dawn was not enough to keep her
from being carried in whatever
direction the changing wind suggested.

But eventually--she sensed the boy
had passed under the leviathan's
jawbone into a graveyard overlooking

the sea. She knew there was no way
to change him: she knew he would
lie on his mother's grave forever--

stunned beyond all reason, unconsoled,
that gray-as-the-answer would enter.

And the hills are messy with golden stalks.
The gray of the ocean is always with him.
The reddish fall vines and the grave of the sky.

Same Audit, Same Sacrifice

I spent half my life talking to you
and I never got an answer. That's a kind
of sailing you wouldn't call sailing

unless you had to. I wanted to know
about the earth and the sea--about
the unleashed moments. I marked the days,

I measured the snow fall, in summer
I washed my feet in buckets. In fall
while other people were sporting

bright sweaters, and carrying home
bags of tomatoes, I watched
the shadow of the barges, watched

the dragging of the river,
the specter and the moment--then
I took the selfsame audit.

---

Jane Mead is the author of House of Poured-Out Waters (Illinois, 2001) and The Lord and the General Din of the World (Sarabande, 1996). A recipient of awards and fellowships from the Whiting, Lannan, and Guggenheim foundations, she is poet-in-residence at Wake Forest University and teaches in the low-residency MFA program at New England College. contents | next