for Lora Berg

I begin where she ended:
a beam of narrow light
straight through her heart,
she stands at a window.

I shall have to invent
the landscape, like Milton
configuring the garden
in the hurtle behind
blind eyes, tracing from what
words garner: hummingbird ,
hibiscus , the fleshly
conflagration of orchises
in deep shade. Behind her
and old man died, died
in the terror God alone brings,
razoring the stem of blood
that held him, momentarily,
between earth and sky.

I take her words, her
cadences, her counterpoint
of syllables, notes written
on air and sweet to the tongue.

I conjure the foolhardy dead,
finding the boy in the bathtub—
the slit wrists clouding the water
with a dreamy spillage: rose,
rosewood grain, and all
the antique eloquence of tables,
chairs, carpets, tapestries
where maid meets swain
beneath trees that never were
except in Indies that only are
in dreams, dreams of hibiscus
and of hummingbird, the blur
of wings steering the beak
straight to what waits
like water trapped underground
in an island without rivers.

I touch the slowing pulse
of the boy bleeding for love,
my own heart staked to the foreign
earth. I end where she begins.