Thorn-Apple, By ELLEN BRYANT VOIGT

They’re walking in early evening, still light,

his head bent toward her but tilted slightly up,

the road a paved gully in these hills, on each side

a corridor of mullein and weeds, and beyond,

the damp unfolded bolts of patchy grass,

alfalfa blooming around the crippled trees,

the trees themselves cast on the slope

with symmetry enough to let her know

they once were planted there--

each detail

animates the flat abstracting mind he drifts inside,

its thick mist of dailiness and rue;

her task, endless and partial,

is willed attention: who had once been

subject and object, the artifact of desire.

Now she is the first one up the path--

the blindman’s wife, brushing

a hand before her face as though

to open the beaded curtain of a door, her voice

sending back over her shoulder what she finds:

“gnarled”; the “dwarf”; then, “human,”

because the trees, seen from this distance,

seem contiguous but do not touch.

From “Two Trees” (Norton: $17.95; 64 pp.).

1992 by Ellen Bryant Voigt. Reprinted by permission. Voigt is on the faculty at Warren Wilson College. This new collection explores the “limits of what’s given and what’s made from luck and will.”