portraits from the Helga Suite by Andrew Wyeth
(1) Order
The ways of the wind are nothing,
tracts and peninsulas pale beside
your fingernail.
This is the hand: clay and craving
one. Where so much light is
stir engenders;
shift a hip
and let a mountain bloom. Length,
radiance from thumb to forefinger makes,
breaks. The tangible sheet
groans, crinkles to the gavel
of your joyful fist.
(2) Nameless
Treasure it now
in curtain and cover,
now, for the light of this world hunts
lips for itself: tenderest
of tinder.
Autumn wind, fond wind
flash-happy, trapper,
sparks down your neck’s most
answering rise.
(3) Source
Your mouth is an opening in light,
end point fleetingly
extended, past lines’ accord.
In darkness and presence
deep soft
slopes lean
quiet nearer
home, hear the widening
of mine, this hour perhaps
of all your eyes.
(4) Seaside
With one foot jutting out
of dream, you last in relation
to sand, to this desert
of warmth and knowing
where I sang you, so
beseechingly saw.
With the shade of your body beside you
you’re floating now on oceans
of what had no color here,
what after in memory
rose may gleam or bluish
in surf’s burning.
(5) Guise
Now I would return
as ‘man in garb’, in knottedness
of flesh and form.
As all the rest: so still,
so surely stuck between
the stone and flame:
where granite gapes
I raise my head.
Among such boulders
even weakish light
is overmuch,
where my shadow finds toehold
in unthinkable rifts
and even the lizard no longer
shifts at my footfall,
knower of this lesser,
lover of what now would weary be.
(6) Sights
The farther you get from me
the truer I tell your
drift: shoulder
called from after, coat on
shoulder, snow on
coat, go on.
Like white tablets
flakes fall,
friendly as eyes
of foxes. In phases,
doses I get you
gone and in crosshairs
--Lloyd Haft (from Atlantis, Querido 1993)
