The mass grave here is set with stones
Piled low inside a low rock wall,
And marked for travelers by a sign
That tells us briefly of the murder
Of six score emigrants, whose bones
Lay here and there once—on the plain,
In the gulley—left to the weather
Of almost a century where they fell—
Leaves and fruit were falling
And I only wanted to know
Why this, of all the trees,
Kept alternating greens
And browns and why it dropped
Those ugly pods and stems—
I only wanted to know
Of the roots, the crazy clutch
That broke the ground, the branches
Let’s see. This morning—since you’ve been gone—
I’ve taken a walk on the beach, naming
And naming and naming, until I can name no more.
Comber, anemone, crab. Will these do?
I talk to myself now—so I’ve found—
As never before, when he’d leave me, often
Now, and now you. I guess I’ll get used
To the feeling. But it’s funny—the way I get thinking
A landscape lies under the open sky . . .
(Open? The sky’s the limit,
the daylight veil over the illimitable,
withdrawn for revelation from the darkness
beyond of Adam’s first—and longest—nightmare
trying to count quastars telstars from pulstars.
Nth grandson Blaise, a rodent of nocturnal
In the west door for kings alone swung wide,
the leather-padded wicket, left behind me
stifling a gasp, expired.
No more fresh air:
I had entered the dim, mouldy, hollow hush
of a dead church—the silence of the ‘grave
and reverend’ sirs ghosting it in their gowns—
Glimpsed askance through leaves, the sky
looks lapis and ivory;
confronted, blinds and is blinded by
the sun’s incandescence.
Through the thick shadow of a mulberry
a white-wing dove may flute a cool blue call
continuo; and Christ,
A crest of wind runs and rustles through the pinons
Below the butte, and it is evening; the moss-green shade
Glimmers with lancets and gems of the afternoon sun;
The fields beyond glow yellow-gold; and the overcast
Of azure dims pale and like powder in the air
Fails away into the recesses of light and time.
I sit before a candle that tips its flame
From the door, and I write . . .
Dear Mother:
I received a letter from you the 8 of May.
I was very glad to hear from you but I had to wet
The letter with tears. You are a good Mother to me.
Their was a letter came from Father too.
I remember how icy the alarm clock was that morning when I grabbed it and fumbled under the covers for the button. I didn’t want my mother to hear it and get up too, because…
For the better part of a month, I was with a group of young Mormons bent on giving the Church a vigorous expression in all the arts. We were not very clear as to just what we would do. We would do something. We felt the Church deserved this. It was such a fine Church, everything considered. And it deserved us. Not in its (then) present state, maybe; but we had faith that it could puff up to us. There was the son of an official sculptor, a yearn ing scientist from Alberta, two or three others who do not congeal into iden tities in the twenty-three-year-old mist I am looking into; and there was me, an ink-stained veteran of a year of writing C to C-plus freshman themes at Weber College. We all met near the end of our term at Biarritz American University in the south of France, the winter after one of the wars had ended.
Nearly fifteen years have passed since I, in looking around for a thesis topic, began to read “Mormon novels.” It seems odd to remember how electrifying were the “forbidden” Vardis Fisher and others I hadn’t heard of: Scowcroft, Whipple, Robertson, Blanche Cannon, even Samuel Taylor. It must be a clue to our culture that a girl could get through graduate school without such an awakening, especially when many of those writers seem so bland today that I wonder along with Sam Taylor “if most of them weren’t mainly victims of bad timing.” What my awakening really consisted of was a refreshing realization that some of those giants from our past were really human beings after all (“saints by adoption”).