Dolls

They are so like Us, frozen in a bald passion Or absent Gaze, like the cows whose lashes Sag beneath their frail sacks of ice. Your eyes are white with fever, a long Sickness. When you are asleep, Dreaming of another country, the wheat’s Pale surface sliding In the wind, you are walking in every breath Away from me. I gave you a stone doll, Its face a dry apple, wizened, yet untroubled. It taught us the arrogance of silence, How stone and God reward us, how dolls give us Nothing. Look at your cane, Look how even the touch that wears it away Draws up a shine, as the handle Gives to the hand. As a girl, you boiled Your dolls, to keep them clean, presentable; You’d stir them in enormous pots, As the arms and legs bent to those incredible Postures you preferred, not that ordinary, human Pose. How would you like me?— Leaning back, reading aloud from a delirious Book. Or sprawled across your bed, As if I’d been tossed off a high building Into the street, A lesson from a young government to its people. When you are asleep, walking the fields of another Country, a series of shadows slowly falling Away, marking a way, The sky leaning like a curious girl above a new Sister, your face a doll’s deliberate Ache of white, you walk along that grove of madness, Where your mother waits. Hungry, very still. When you are asleep, dreaming of another country, This is the country.