Self-Portrait as Marianne Moore at her Mother’s Funeral

Gettysburg, July 1947

With my good heels
and summer wools,
            I am a conic slice among trapezoids
            plunged in grass and lapidific ducktails
pushed east-northeast
by cannon blast.
            I am not in tears. Like the wild mint I lap
            against the monuments, breeding, bridling
my green thoughts, my
private riots.
            I take shape. America, made for orphans:
            now you are made for me. So: I hoist this death
as a bindle
of bleached flannel
            and hit this black road where motherless Lincoln
            stopped, his lackeys tripping in its cannon pocks.
In his silence
I see good sense.
            Cemeteries are like zoos: they teach the art
            of privacy behind their stamped gray placards.
Inviolate
as steel the at-
            -home hours of dens, of the dead. The bear sleeps
            or files its claws; it is not our business,
unbeckoned to
its lone curfew.
            This side of that exquisite habitat, we
            the visitors, and pigeons shitting freely,
uncaged. I am
in memoriam,
            I am Jackie Robinson, I am Huck Finn –
            bastarded since my mother lay down with time.