Blueberry Ballad

In what may have been our last week, we went
down to the late afternoon meadow,
and stood at the high blueberry bushes,
arboreal altars, and our fingers spelled out
gestures of grateful worship of the earth.
He had tied the two-handled netilat yadayim
cup on a ribbon around his bull neck,
and picked with both hands, as he had played me at both breasts
and brought out the string-instrument keening,
and I had a two-cup measure in one hand
and was taking the fruit four and five at a time with the other.
And fellow creatures called—hawk,
yellowthroat, loon, catbird. This was what we’d
lived, together, though sometimes I felt
that he thought living was “better than” writing,
and for months no words had come to me, so I was
foraging, without language—
and to stand in that heaven, the haze of blue
a yard above the ground like a mist,
without
prospect
of song,
was like
a hell to me, as if I had no
spoken intimacy with color
or shape, or seed, or sugar,
but was breathing mechanically, without singing,
without that parallel world, as if
the companionship of a page, like a word-
balloon above the bush’s head, is where
half my identity is, in the poems,
which did not come back to me, until
I came away, alone—as if I have
loved not only the earth, but the motion into
spirit of matter that jumps out into the
air and tries to haul the meadow
up into safety.