Ruth Daigon

Complaints
Priority Mail for My Sons
Equations
Connecting the Fuse, Setting the Timer


Complaints

The dead complain we lack
the skill to keep them buried.
But that's the grave's job
and there's no safe burial ground.
They'll shine up through the earth
spreading their affection.

They're offered refuge
under markers and memorials
but they refuse and wait
for us in unlit places
tapping their white canes
with the terrible patience
of those possessing time.

In the slow caress of years,
our weight is doubled by
the burden of others
we cultivate and carry,
and deep in the future
our children keep us alive.

---

Priority Mail for My Sons
(for Tom and Glenn)

I mailed you an extra year
from another country
where wooden sidewalks
end in cinder paths

where privies lean
a little more each year
and morning light falls
weightless on rain barrels

Enclosed you'll find a chevy
with running boards
a Burma Shave sign
that points the way you'll

travel years from now
I've wrapped with care
the smell of citronella
camphor and cod liver oil

the gramaphone scratching out
Hi-Di-Hi's and Bye-Bye-Blues
A blade of grass to whistle through
a fortress at the beach

a woolen bathing suit that
shrinks an inch each season
It's just arrived and waiting
at the back door of your life

---

Equations

since I have learned not to kill them
things have been easier

though I prefer my ghosts
to inhabit the dark

if they come by day
I'll leave all the doors open

i watch them mouthing secrets
smiling as if there were two heavens

I recall simple equations in the heart's circumference
each sum exquisitely fixed in my memory

women in sweet and sudden rages
for fear the future comes when they're not looking

children claustrophobic in their skins
fanning out like fish bones

younglings piercing love's delicate membrane
to taste the fleshy core

friends in the gray solfeggio of autumn
and the ritual smile

together with them the seeded hours pass
until a spill of sun a sweep of shade

and under the ashen stars
my dead are growing old

---

Connecting the Fuse, Setting the Timer

In this place of pure invention
with rocks enough to fashion
tombstones for all the dead,
we walk time on a leash

and move in narrow sandals
under the hammered sky
where something lies half-buried,
waiting.

Armies arrange to grow imaginary
and the everyday happens:
a suitcase, a parcel
and a man loses both his legs.

In this smoldering landscape
there is no deep enough
where we can hide.

Even in the sun,
in the salt and citrus air,
branches rattle obituaries
and the past spreads like a stain.

We grow a single name
a single face--
shut spring
smooth rock.

Still
we tell old stories,
pull weeds,
snap dead flower heads
and watch the young sleeping
breathless

As they prepare to leave,
we stand aside
smiling in an older language
waving them on with casual hands
and shuttered hearts.

Schooled in flowers,
matriculated in bombs,
we're trapped in a common dark
watching for pale buds of new stars,
touching pain lightly
before the next explosion.

Ruth Daigon was editor of Poets On: for twenty years until it ceased publication. Her poems have been published in Recursive Angel, Shenandoah, Negative Capability, Poet & Critic, Kansas Quarterly, Alaska Quarterly,Atlanta Review, Poet Lore and many other publications. She has been featured as Poet-Of-The-Month on The University of Chile's Pares Cum Paribus (an "E" chapbook in English and Spanish). Her latest poetry collection is Between One Future and the Next, and she has just won the 1997 Ann Stanford Poetry Prize (University of Southern California).