Spring song

The hours hang from the chandelier of night.
One goes out; no sleep. Instead, a memory

of a walk with a friend in the woods of the northeast
where pines grew around stones the size of homes.

We’d climb and stand atop, surrounded by green
needles breeze-shimmering. I wanted to show her

how the thick green moss peels back
from the rock like the skin of an orange.

But the higher we get, the more we look up.
Elevated by the undiscovered, a cold complete object.

The hours glow, out of my reach. And sleep’s reach:
Peaches on a tree at a midsummer dusk

behind the orchard’s mesh fence. One drops out of sight:
silence: there’s no sound to the yearning for absence.

No explaining that what I’m yearning for
will warm with the next sun

but not change as flowers come and go.
I knew as a child about love,

that you can pick it up a like a rock,
keep it in your pocket like a talisman, lose

it without telling a lie or changing the love at all,
it’s misplaced, it’s discarded, it’s thrown away

but it’s always somewhere and will never change.
Let the spring moss find its crevices and cover it.

I don’t want to see another minute of this night.
I want to lie beneath the season.Underneath, where rocks lie