Читать книгу Eventually One Dreams the Real Thing - Marianne Boruch - Страница 11

The Breathing

Think back with a shovel, bend,

do that.

Who’s breathing through these tubes now?

So this is how you

plant trees in Scotland all afternoon.

We take instruction. The translucence

of it. Each plastic cylinder the exact shade of

a stem tall and suddenly wide, slipped

over sapling after sapling

sunk into earth, tied, staked against wind.

The mallet comes down.

January. A wee walk, we’re told,

to get here. Fields this old,

the lives that lived. To ask anything

is to lose the question —

Hills plus sheep plus cold. Air like wet gauze

but sun, a bright accident.

Still: who’s breathing through these tubes now.

I see plain enough, upright

nether-vents, their cool green

so many rows made

in the making. Barely trees at all

hidden, each incandescence.

It’s the shovel, abrupt.

It’s the fierce

stopped, to fierce again

the suck, the lift up

to go deep

a stunned thing.

It must draw them, the dead.

Both the violence and the ceasing must

remind them.

Because haven’t they come

to lie here, their half-light just visible under

old stalks and grass. Dusk, with its

new dead and old dead…

And true, isn’t it — that

we’ve pleasured them. True that our

hammering in breath

is another breath.

Not that I love you, the mouths they had

through oak, willow now, birch

will say —