Elegy: Another Flower for Good

Somewhere, an eagle watches the silver fish 
from the cottonwoods as if the great artists

once more painted angels hovering in bone 
and petal flesh, in soot and rock.

What ancient Chinese poet wrote,
“Though Pity, all our hours, weeping remembers"?

My camera holds the barest inch of this—
what I thought of once in an eagle’s sudden floating 

and, again, in the redwing blackbirds I passed by
in the old cattails of a river. And, now, 

                 in this flower I can give you, only here. 

                      —for Renee Good, who could have been my student: 
                         poet, mother, conscientious objector