Rosemary Winslow   LINDEN Tea of dried flower, toothed heart-shaped leaf. Linden for soothing, grandmother would grieve, speaking in English, to me. I used to blame all the family's troubles on history-- German hordes tamed a bit by philosophy, music, and linden. Yet I never saw that tree-- until once in a friend's neighborhood, intoxicated by fragrance, I looked up-- blossoms of thick cream, fireworks, suns! I saw my mother some kind of blind, so tired, so many of us, my father laid out an angry log sunk on the davenport, me on the hearth trying to keep warm, the other half the heart biting, wired for life.   GOING HOME There is no going home as usual the vehicle stalls in reverse gear in mud tracks as essential as the flat fields, the blades of shadowed pines over the drive, the sun bleeding from the west. On the rise the house, painted clapboard, the color of cream, is rented now like bodies of water and minerals made living by some miracle which is to say some process we don't understand. Some day we'll have a different owner, a different lover, pine trees and whirling wind that primitive communion a new testament of each generation. All going home is never going back-- there may be ruin and mud tracks deep to make wheels spin. The only way is slogging on, or else walking on water. Or yet it may be dry the sand flying in your nostrils but you must breathe, must go, must go on, which is to say, go on making required visits, like stations of a cross. It is a way of finding what we lost or never had, of learning we are only renters, and making new covenants, of going where we belong.   WHITE GROUND And you're standing, after these years, by the well, April and you expecting like a rose close-guarded, tight, and hard to touch. Suppose the print of violets in your dress unveils your secret: Father setting out to plow the fallow ground, thinking not much would come to interrupt the quotidian life we summed in sheep's wool, planted fields, pregnant cows, you stitching seamless rags to sticks to frighten crows. And then he harrowed you, too, one red dawn, you took it all, you said nothing of your need. Your deft fingers fastened the able seed like buttons on a gown already sewn. For you are where the horned ram never goes, never gets to in his isolated pry. Your knowledge came on imperceptibly, a gradual globe that holds all and knows its issue will be born in time. And so it grows. And you lived there with this sun child, remained insistently from us who feared we'd starve in sight of your smile mocking the sun's curve that spring you carried twins and the rains kept coming, coming. The sheep dropped their young dead in the drowned cherry blossoms in our yard, the seed washed out, even the dog disappeared. You kept smiling that rain was song you'd always sung. You kept smiling as if the rains contained the sun. We never could believe. Later I learned at the university to list tempests: that these your swamps were not unlike Memphis, where goddesses breed new life from bodies burned by sun's intensity; our odysseys are woven more than for ourselves: they suit the youngest ones who are at war and mute against the sun's dear cattle, Circe, the seas. Still, you whelm me, the white ground, ground of your well-veiled ease.   BACKYARD at first I thought mysterious fire neon valentine o! heart shape flaming foil through the skinned limbs of the myrtle but it was the eastern sun come to swim a red brick wall   so now the myrtle nods droops bunches of deep pink clusters over the stairwell where I stare into their yard the neighbors do not speak to us 5 A.M. I rise from a wreckage of sleep again the long blind scarf of grief and yesterday and yesterday’s gunmetal page the porch lights hiss at the shroud-hung sky I go down the stairs to the garden to be where the roses are leaning heavy and sweet on the long fence I lift my face from burial into burial in the softness of flowers that is like the skin under the necks of animals tears shine in the small white crosses in their fire centers the star clematis has made and entered on the dead espaliered pear suddenly I am jarred wheep and again wheep wheep I hear hidden birds coming alive one by one in the trees threads of light undraping the roof lines and my throat trembling up one singing composing the sky   Rosemary Winslow's work has appeared in 32 Poems, Poet Lore, The Southern Review, Crux, Innisfree Poetry Journal, and other journals. She has received the Larry Neal Award for Poetry twice and Writer's Fellowships from the DC Commission for the Arts and The Vermont Studio Center. She teaches literature and writing at The Catholic University of America, specializing in American poetry from 1850 to the present. Published in Volume 7, Number 1, Winter 2006.   To read more by this author: Rosemary Winslow: The Whitman Issue Rosemary Winslow: The Wartime Issue Rosemary Winslow: Evolving City Issue Rosemary Winslow: Split This Rock Issue