The women from Yaddo’s kitchen
told us there’d be a parade.
(Ever since they were children—long before

A deer!—nibbling on the few green things
that grow in my strawy meadow.
Mine, we say here: my studio, my meadow, my road.

Waiting on the stairs of The Mizpah Missionary Home on
Summit Avenue, the children of apostles played with
neighborhood kids and sometimes spread the gospel, warming

We all have seen it.
In the slide show he gives each summer.
There he is! (or There you are!) someone will say

The octopus is dead
who lived in Wylies Baths

Chenille-skinned people are counting under the countryside
on resurrections by truck light off among the pines.

That winter. We missed her stark face
at work. Days till she was found, under

The red serpent of cattle, that eclipsed the old dreaming serpents:
there it still is, faintly, winding out of far lilac ranges

I glory centennially slow-
ly in being Guugumbakh the
strangular fig bird-born to overgrow
the depths of this wasp-leafed stinging-tree,

Whatever the great religions offer
it is afterlife their people want:
Heaven, Paradise, higher reincarnations,