The scrub woman for the old bank and jailhouse,

Her face reddening

Over supper on a steamy night,

Is thinking of the village spillway being

Answered by a dry clucking over mud, she is

Touching the burrs on the tongue of the azalea . . .

Exhaustion puts knotted rags in the neck

And shoulders:

As a girl, in Poland, she watched her husband

Be dragged through the shade of five pines

To the execution wall. A year earlier

She had watched him bathe

In the bronze tub the landlord had put

Out in the field as a trough for horses.

She picked him from among the men

Smoking pipes after haying, she rolled

Over on her stomach

To study the blue cornflower; she shyly

Rained on the wildflowers, a hot urine . . .

They laughed, and never knew her brother

Was taken by train to Hamburg, was infected

With tuberculosis, was

In the last days of the war

Stripped along with six other children

And hanged in the boiler room of a post office.

What she has understood

Is there are only

Two speeches the naked make well,

One is of welcome, the other farewell.