No, I'm not the Austrian—you're confusing me
with Dora—the one who deserted Freud
before he had his chance to perfect her.

Chenille-skinned people are counting under the countryside
on resurrections by truck light off among the pines.

That winter. We missed her stark face
at work. Days till she was found, under

The red serpent of cattle, that eclipsed the old dreaming serpents:
there it still is, faintly, winding out of far lilac ranges

The women from Yaddo’s kitchen
told us there’d be a parade.
(Ever since they were children—long before

A deer!—nibbling on the few green things
that grow in my strawy meadow.
Mine, we say here: my studio, my meadow, my road.

I glory centennially slow-
ly in being Guugumbakh the
strangular fig bird-born to overgrow
the depths of this wasp-leafed stinging-tree,

Whatever the great religions offer
it is afterlife their people want:
Heaven, Paradise, higher reincarnations,

One me is still in the yard, the place skinned of feed.
Me, old and sore-boned, little milk in that me now

We ought to hang cutout hawk shapes
in our windows. Birds hard driven
by a predator, or maddened by a mirrored rival