They Always Lived Poem by Mary Angela Douglas

[for Stephen Vincent Benet; for Walt Whitman]

they always lived filling in the blanks others left alone
breaking from the ranks and from the dream of home, derelict.
mad for treasure, ill fated expeditions;

never doubling back
their hands sifting stardust,
the twilights of violet


and skeletal lack.
I heard them I saw them
I knew they were out there

past Quixote's mills

and in my stillness, gathered my scant will
in my own time to lag behind them;
the diamond dust they had become scattering

in trackless trails, the vanishing point of rails or

in the canyons where one Echo lives
that sieves the soul:
"you are never going back..."

then clues dropped like souvenirs into the plum darkness
and no Christmas where I stooped down and wept
all blue forget me not

and slept the dream they deemed worth more
than anything even when falling as they did
that's how it seemed

from a bent wagon under the last, vast witnessing
of American stars and the night birds trilling;
as though it were apple green Spring...a late love prefiguring'

with the horses' gait stumbling into delirium
into the ravine unforeseen the dry gulch withering
where sudden angels gleaned them.

as the snow flies, over the long, long plains
I feel it always winter-wise, the tallowless
heralding; their demise so compassless


and there, near the scrub pines
painted indigo-lamentable, shadowed magenta

my grieved Star
always, I will.


mary angela douglas 11 december 2018; rev.18 january 2019