All grief to the ground must go
and joy, and birds, and every step
taken forward or back is the right
and wise step, and leaves and light
from the center of the moon between
us, and our lives which are air upon
air must settle in a single eventuality, and
from the ground swells always
up through my shoes this love
yearning for the sky’s response
It’s the face silence makes
of us. The wonder of what
has happened, kept
in a glass case of mind
for clarity on nights
when clouds are a low
growl in the future’s throat.
Doesn’t matter what clears
or drifts or can’t fit in when’s frame.
Every where I look I see our moon.
The unfocused object
makes the moonlight beautiful. It is not the other way.
I edge along the side of the dream like a raccoon
along the shadow of a house. To anyone passing
by or peering from a darkened window
I will look not unlike some masked fulfillment,
but then you would have to explain what you were
doing in my dream.
A week in the new house and we’re hearing and seeing things.
Black walnut trees scatter the light. Yellow leaves falling early
and long, through August and September. A few nights ago
someone banging around downstairs woke me up.
At my desk I hear a heavy foot take two strides in the room above
then stop. The room is as empty as a rationale.
One of my dogs is going to die. Almost a reminder of himself.
Behind the house I’m walking beside him in the cooling world
when a walnut pod, size of a baseball, smacks off the eave, bounces
and resounds on the porch’s tin roof. So there they are, my ghosts,
and so many left to fall, real despite what I believe or don’t, reminders,
inconsequential and eventually crumbling within softening husks
but for the moment so hard you’d have to drive a pickup truck
over them to hear a few of them crack open the inedible fruit.
The cratered dead remnant orbits what can’t let it go.
On a night I was alone and the lights weren’t left on
it helped me get my key in the door.
Before rain. Clouds dozens of thoughts away gather
in the corner of your vision, surreptitious as Bigfoot,
as growing up. Every love is an act of defenestration,
like words eye-diving off the page into the casual reader’s
blink of sudden sonder. Hiraeth! when the bookstore closes
something reaches out from you for the story you haven’t held
but would have fit perfectly on your heart’s shelf. Then a dozen
thoughts pass and the petrichor rises from the earth to meet
the first drops of rain, sliding down invisible vines of physics
which determine where they’ll land, but not how you’ll smile.
September Bonfire
In the bonfire I see something that would eat even death.
So death must not be made of air after all.
I see summer’s bones smoldering long after the flame.
The seasons curled like scrolls of verse around each other collapse.
We have one of these every month, the landowner tells me.
Just from the stuff that falls away.
The one who stands in darkness while the other watches the sun set
will be walking in the morning sun while the other kicks off a fitful dream.
At a certain point it will make sense to gather fallen branches.
To dream wide awake of a motion that will eat even death.
The rising full moon fills in
a small cratered crack in the old window
where a stone or BB years ago must
have dug in before reflecting off its loss
As I sit with my son waiting for his breathing
to level into what I know will be dreams
of the many things he will make and be
the moon continues across the sky
and out of the window’s framing (though the moon
in the window cratered out bright and tiny
remains where it is
how like the past sometimes refuses to move)
The thinness of things
is real and holds itself like the only breath
an image can take.
The tree digs through the sky.
On the other side its heart
emerges upside down but still centered
between the branching out
and the taking root. Your life
plunges outward
like a branch occupying space
in a photograph showing neither
its beginning or end
the pond’s surface surely capturing it
somewhere outside the frame
where I cannot see what you see
only the empty sky beneath the tree line
and an image breathing out
to a moment it will never see: a leaf
rippling depth across the landscape
On a long journey. The road darkened like glass
after the candle behind it has guttered.
I met the forest there like a corner rounding everywhere.
Birds who’d never heard themselves before were asking
for their names. Though we could hear the train beyond the ridge
we knew it was empty except for a woman anxious
she’d missed her stop as she dozed. We walked but I could not hear
your step behind me over the sound of the leaves growing.
I am tracking a number in the dark. It keeps changing typeface
to throw me off the trail but it is the only set of tracks ahead of me.
Even as I slow down I am accelerating. Your own footsteps
are catching up to me but I am afraid the number ahead will tire
at last and I will catch it, panting on a hip-high rock among the pine.
I should go back to the woods in the daytime, who ever thought
you were nocturnal, and in the light splaying
among the leaves I am not afraid of numbers.
Translations from the English 