We never plan to leave. Even with no pretense
to stay, a moment washes over me that I could
be dead this moment, and of what I would not
have the moment to question, only gone,
leaving behind a family and world unprepared
to master day and hour and mortality, not
by me at any rate. Teeth in, fears bared,
no held breath barred, I breathe a bit longer.
I lean my head back against the transparent beach.
Starlings pull up the garland of the sky and hang it on trees.
Miniature lake, street puddle spilling sky on a tire.
Because they leap, like that boy I was
we make a leap of faith and the stars stand still–
just the illusion of motion on motion
And the moon, black like a lost penny, shining
only on the edge, has been laughed at enough
to appear a smile. The starlings sharpen
their beaks against the wheel of the hour.
In the forest path dream where the light slashing through
leaves are words written too fast for me to read
And your spirit animal pauses, its white head shifting as if sniffing
the undergrowth and pulling the colors of the undergrowth into the air
I am the trunk of the blue tree, observing silently as you walk by,
grazed by your eyes like understanding is a wounding season
Still unaware the words in the air are poems I am writing
by the light that filters past me unabsorbed and I’m growing only
to be still, rooted deep at passage’s edge to the turning earth
beneath the whistling sun shuffling its days
-painting by Mary Winifred Hood Schwaner
Crow shadow passes across the shrugging pine
In the dark a shadow cannot move
It is paralyzed even when the body moves
the shadow stays you cannot shake it
When light filters through the branches
the bird long gone the shadow will
hold still, as if it were never there
In the daylight the wind in high branches
can at least be seen if not heard
In the spring it will regain its voice
the trees will put on their hands and applaud
Their applause is what we hear
The performance itself slips through ungrasped
How can you lose the sky
When you can look right through me
And see the gears of the earth
Building themselves to your motion
Down on the ground where it’s all
silent as time I weave the weeds
On the river of dirt
Into my invented life
But the least rooted stalk
Will have none of it and flows off
and the weeds see through me
They see you they see you
In the wolf’s eye is the guile of the sun:
I turned my back on the sinking day
To find it’s still staring at me, placid
spurned communion wafer
Translations from the English 