The Kitchen Maid In The Garden

[from a song cycle on Hans Andersen's The Nightingale]

a jeweled bird is their constellation;it won't be mine.
mine is the plain one that no one can unwind
or wind

the free one on the small winds, fee simple;
it binds my heart's disconsolation
on the clock without hands

the lilied one and skims the
surface of departing light
whenever I leave or think I can

what is continually mourned
and alternately, soothed.

we walk through the ghosts of music
my shadow and I bemused
through the long grasses, by the river

and it is nightfall falling again
staining the viridian grasses blue
oh blue, the colour where I hide

to hear the slight bird sing
to the ghosts of music not of enterprise
and they are all weeping, then.

mary angela douglas 28 march 2018