The moon’s not looking
out a window in
the house next door
to the west of bed.
Rising I talk the evening
down from its sorrows:
What begins as one thing
passes into another, I say,
sundown to dusk to night
for instance, night to
faintest light to dawn
to day. Then night says
in a voice so dark I can
not read its words
What begins as love
passes into love
and from the house next door
to the east of my steps
the moon rises
as from its black chimney
The flowers reach for their reflections.
A potted plant floats in the air as car
after car runs through it without moving
a petal. A building’s slanting shadow
cuts the road in halves. As I look again
the flowers are not reaching for anything.
A volume of my favorite poet
occupies the left-turn lane.
Car after car have stopped and are waiting;
No light changes. Was all the motion imagined?
Sometimes it’s the other way around,
though most times the winter sun does x off x
by which I mean, you glimpse it baring the soul
of a whisper of empty branches or scrolling a message
across exhausted snow crusting a street corner
and you see reality, suddenly, not in a new way but an old
way in the way the winter sun is old, it’s been burning
so long after all maybe you think not with the heat
it had as a younger sun when everything grew green
beneath its gaze till a hemisphere turned its shoulder one
season and that was it, but sometimes it’s the other way
around, things can be cold and burning at once,
sometimes reality sees you, and it’s blinding.
A thousand years from now, the distance between last night
and tonight will be infinite. Unreachable, like the star
you pretend to hold at the end of the line I never wrote.
The last night of a waning moon is this night’s memory
cradling in its thin hand the entire darkness
of what we almost cannot see and so pretend
is not there even as what never happened
pulls us back like moonlight through winter trees.
Stay awake to watch. You have only twenty five thousand seconds
to read this before you wake up remembering that
I never wrote it, brimming with loss and a poem that
started with How does the waning moon still rise?
At the walnut tree’s highest reach
the day’s breeze sets twigs and thin branches
tense like frantic lost messages, last waves goodbye
but the slur slows through the random knots
and twists of the limb structure and’s spread asunder
further in by the outward-reaching limbs and widening
resolve of main branches to the absolute breaking
of leftover negative space: down where I am, humming
a tune I heard my beloved sing and will not forget,
just my voice in the quiet, here at the trunk where all is still.
The night’s face comes out of the empty screen or blank sheet
and watches me at my desk, whispers without moving its lips:
Why ruin this silence we all come back to? or make a mark
where no mark will stay? Lean in, and listen:
and after a while I do, and after an hour or a minute
or a second I place my hands in front of me
and write until the sound of my writing
is something the night’s hands make
and to you who can hear it, and looked up
from your reading, and then back down
at everything which will pass into nothingness,
tell me you can unsee these marks, tell me.
I am one of four men entrusted with delivering refugees
from a disputed territory. The road lays over bare hills and open
fields. Everyone carries only what they need. I carry
their memories, so I can only take half a step at a time.
When the first bomb explodes by the roadside, the others
are already far ahead of me. The memories are important
but sometimes you have to outrun memories to escape.
I am cresting a hill, beyond it are more hills and small fires
where the bombs have landed. Gunfire bounces off the road
nearby and I break from the path, dropping nothing,
staying low. Somewhere there have to be trees, undergrowth,
a forest, where I can escape the ground.
Heavy clouds drag night’s crooked river.
The body of sleepless hours is not found.
Above the atmosphere of days
the heart’s stone direction passes unseen
though out alone, in the cool rain
my skin is burning with its re-entry.
I tie my hiking boots tight before I step outside to watch the year fall.
I am not afraid I will float away on Star River; my heart is 400 miles
upstream already. My family scattered. Just the cats and dogs here
to nibble water crackers with. Any year’s last hours are crumbs on a plate,
forgotten on the kitchen counter. For once I wish to be in a crowd
in a loud living room, my heartbeat adding to the temporary chatter.
Walk out with me, old friend. There will be snow in the year’s first hour
at the head of the trail, and I cannot finish this wine alone.
Unseen rain four hours away on the black horizon.
While you focus on the empty branches above your head
the stars blur into overcast, a milky blue apology
the child within me will not accept.
The Cape Cod inlets flow through him
like the roots of these trees thread mountains.
He is a trick of the light, of beach grass and sand.
And now the days are too short, he will never get home.
Translations from the English 