Valerie Duff

—after Peter Brueghel Why a tree except the world sustains? The harvesters’ clean whites so far from town. Like fountains, water drops of grass heads. Like postscript, endless roads through Flanders. Close up, men like lapel buttons through haloes, mending, mending. Like snakeskins, white shirts against gold. The maze leads, panoramic, to the earth’s shelf

Before Louisiana, Jefferson signaled Lewis with a mirror to his home at Monticello, the hilly path between plantations ten miles on horseback. Distance was a summons to expand the language of one’s purchase, to annotate direction. Knowing the terrain was, for many, second nature. Lewis tracked veiny rust-colored routes that arced like hipbones in his

five my father hears the island language no one but he can understand, moon sound
birthed as pearls

Against these walls, too thin, a
wooden giant leans. In dimness
we mistake it for a coffin, or chrysalis.
We rock myths in the cradle.