Classic Poem

March comes,
and Eastern bluebird shows himself,
a long-awaited call, on the telephone wire,
Confederate blue and old blood.

Make a fist. Okay, hold up your arm
like that a minute or two.
You'll have the lab report next week.
If you still like mortality.

We go past church and stones, genesis, exodus.
That house played house to many bones;
these fields, to hoof and brogan,
that hilltop woods to wind.

Wind whips her dress against her legs,
under the clothesline, taking down the ghosts.
It's cold. They aren't whipped out by wind,
our ghosts — they drive the wind.

A future's hatching out of firmament,
an Oberland, and 1865 is drying mist — and last year,
what recollection has last year —
two, not one, here?