Though there is far more space
between raindrops than there is rain
it is natural to feel the rain and not the dry space.
This evening: inside, dry, all I feel is the space
We disappear into the unseen ahead of us:
Already built, a bridge will reveal itself
when we arrive where a bridge is needed.
We’re not the first to make this trip.
I don’t want to believe it, either—
so I won’t, until the image clears.
Then there is only what there is
and I won’t have to believe anything
I can’t see, or in anything I can’t see.
Maybe belief is only what we practice
while waiting. I only know I’d kill anything
and hold it up to the sun to see you safe.
Mid-morning snow after a night of sleet.
Ice is melting off the roofs, descending
faster than flakes can fall, but they go
only their own speed, unconcerned
with making up the distance
Negative space of roof and branches
are defined by the rising moon, crow-sized
negative image of the crow’s solid eye. Just the other
day, a young pileated woodpecker stood
right where the moon is tonight, as bright,
exactly as big, cartoonish, sounding like a monkey
afraid of the moon in the leafless branches
Through the honest tree limbs a hundred vultures float
like a cloud of gnats. No like the floating ashes of burning leaves.
No as they get closer I see they are stitching something
into the air, shape of a common hunger borne aloft
and visible only through this inscribing of individual
wills in contrast and in wind, swirling like the last
sip of wine in a glass, up, down, settle, rinsed away,
all just a matter of perception of a form against
its temporary constraint, not ever really part of your
moment when it continues on, or ceases holding
your own thought against the edges of your world
as if the world was something to hold your drink
or your memories, or even your body in its form
perceived from two hundred feet up and a quarter
of a mile away as something too big to land on and eat.
It’s the mildest day in weeks, in the neighborhood the heat pumps are quiet
and where last night was dry wind raising the leaves for another ride tonight
the rain wanders in around dinnertime, so fine you can’t even feel it but in the beam
of a parked truck’s headlights it looks like it is pouring. Later it will rain hard
but it’s here mostly for the duration, to check off the seconds of the night, like a reminder,
that the next one will be colder and harder, and that after that there will be snow.
Leaves stampeding past a second floor window like escaped horses.
Gray scales of a dragon’s vast belly slides over the city.
A cloud viewed through empty branches, ghost of foliage.
A vapor trail unwriting itself across the day’s crisp paper.
I walk up my own street after sunset.
The moon is not yet up and the last streetlight
is behind me. Slowly, slowly I trudge up the hill
and slowly, slowly my shadow fades into the dark bricks.
I have lost myself and where I am going
but with no streetlights the roof has been taken off
the world. If I stood still I could find and count a star
for each of the eighteen thousand days I have lived so far.
Here in the dark stretch of street they are with me.
With my shadow gone and the dark bricks
pretending not to move at the speed of stars.
Someone tell the two Canada geese
flying up the street at quarter past nine
this November evening they are heading
to West Virginia
Translations from the English 