Almost midnight, mild mid-December
Tell the day to let go of the lake.
It is deeper than even the night
and its stars are alive.
Down here in the heart nothing
is burning, even tragedy houses
the vulnerable gestures of life.
Come dawn the night and the day will
once again renew their tepid rivalry.
Miles away the mountain awakes
and realizes he is a lake, too.
In August the dogs dodge the fall
of black walnuts in the back yard,
the baseball-heavy pods landing
even at night like the home team rallying.
*
The three inch palmetto bug cockroach
drops from the hairy stalks of palmetto
trees on the heads of couples leaving the bar.
Light like a lawsuit under an unironed linen shirt.
In the still summer swamp a cypress knee’s
a mountain. Behind the patient transparent lid
of danger there is not a single smooth straight
line on two hundred million years of hide.
*
On the hill I dump more March snow
behind my truck into a pile impenetrable as Everest
without a Sherpa. The uneven humps
of buried cars stretch ahead: back of a giant alligator,
danger lies silent on the surface of the road.
Almost too slow for the eye, the lowcountry marsh
bends against the new season’s subtle color.
Above the snowline the years startle:
the flick of the starling’s iridescent wing.
Venus pulled the moon over the morning sky
like a necklace snagged on a t-shirt
skids over a pale back on the surface of heaven
The creek was buried forty years ago.
It runs unseen beneath the motel parking lot.
Here I am taking off my clothes
before I write this next couplet.
I don’t want what the day wore
to come between us. Like all
those tourists, who came to see
the thing that was moved
so they had a place to park
and undress, and sleep
without seeing a thing.
The mist is the earth weeping for transparency.
You were there when the world was softened,
when a thought of condensed desire slurred you,
made slow motion replays of us all,
like a snowfall changing its mind or a road sign
rendering movement of all kinds but time travel impossible.
The empty sky can be conquered with a feeling
shaped like a color so simple it absorbs
nothing, How transparent is this tear?
It is the glistening sky praying to be earthbound,
to land on an unshod foot moments before
it is obscured by a step towards the wish.
The sky will have its wish and the earth will
have its wish and like the shape
of a new letter from a familiar alphabet
your body will walk my words in the mist.
A few stars, like holes in oblivion’s memory
mapped a gesture in us we could not forget
Even time, confused, changed direction
rolling the jar of the moon back home
Standing in the back yard
of my heart.
No value
in raking a yard of wet leaves!
River how do I find you always
in the same place when
you have the inclination of the mountain
yet lean towards level speech
narrow minded yet source of every ocean
where a late sun is sipping on the horizon
Translations from the English 