What we want is the red kickball on the roof of the elementary school.
What we want is for someone to do what our teachers could not.
Go up there with a ladder
and toss it casually down.
What we want is for what we want
to bounce a little closer.
Last night I heard the first crickets of the year
and the first click and hum of air-conditioning units
five hours before my own calendar page turned over again–
I was in the woods of my mind, looking for a word that never lived
in the way some look for creatures that cannot be
where they have been seen though it cannot be doubted
something has been seen. By looking for this mystery
I was creating the word. Is this how love is created?
A word that suddenly obtains meaning and mystery
in the deepest neck of our woods? Five hours
from the fifty first anniversary of what I cannot remember
the machines and fans hijacked the night
lifted it in the bothered air like helicopters waiting
on every building to take off. But they never leave.
History just another season we can’t hear change
traveling as we are, faster than the speed of truth.
The mystery opens like the mouth of a wolf
and closes like bare feet running on a path
and in the middle is a window neither open nor closed
and a festival we can attend only as words to each other.
It spreads out like a spill against forgetting.
All the grounded helicopters
are silenced when the thunder knocks the power out
and people open their windows cautiously
one day closer to forgetting there was a night
without open windows and crickets.
The bare feet of a word prowl across my eyelids.
Each footprint is different, like a word in many languages.
“Much of our experience takes place in an interior landscape. But … the most mindful way to access that seems to be through the external landscape.”
Emily Hancock of St Brigid Press interviewed me May 20 at the SBP printshop in Afton, Virginia. You can hear the interview and read the transcript here.
St Brigid Press will be publishing a chapbook of my work, Wind Intervals, in the late summer.
The cars approach and diminish but the road goes nowhere.
The storm stands across the street and says go.
Panic fans out.
The grass migrating without moving.
One blade bending to talk and the other
to listen … but to some other voice,
arriving from a distance. A voice with the tongue of a shadow
as if all this light traveling ninety million miles amounted
to a message smaller than a grassblade.
How small this poem must be in the field of minds!
I heard some people talking as they walked
across the wide green library yard, laughing
at a study suggesting that plants and trees
communicate. One bent his head toward the other,
whose face, angled away from the sun,
was obscured in the late afternoon shadows.
I can still outrun my children
but the race has to be very short
or very long. And the middle space
widens every day,
We drove out of town in early spring
to visit a friend of my daughter
whose family makes church organs
among the folded hills of Virginia farmland.
There the metal is boiled and poured
in a long flat trough, so thin it can
be rolled into the pipes that channel
air into faith-appropriate pitch.
The cows leisurely await their doom
in the fields all around.
The sharp shinned hawk flies low
across the field and alights on an old post.
The family’s house is a crossroad of winds–
every stiff breeze in the valley seems to force
its way toward the house, from every direction,
speeding through foothill and gap,
funneled by finely ill-mapped roads,
reaches their yard finally as a constant gale
ripping the voice from trees and shrubs as we stumble
to the side door. My daughter’s friend
is used to it, she shouts from the porch, it never ends.
I think it is all the winds of the world auditioning
for a chance to flow through those pipes
and into the shadows of stillness
and be heard as something straight from God.
At home it is calm as a confessional.
The library across the street is closed.
We always have books to bring back,
and we always find them when the library
is closed. The silver maple next door
is so covered with English ivy it should be dead
but it has bloomed again this year,
enough to make the blue jay invisible.
I recognize his pitched query as others recognize
in the church organ the vowels of God.
I hear, in my own breath as I stand on the porch,
that same fierce longing as those winds
to become somebody else’s voice.
Sitting on the mid-afternoon porch
of your life, the day seems still.
Buildings not moving, memories
like distant clouds.
Then the sun moves, shadows
lengthen. The clouds
are getting closer.
Versions of a corner. Red flag sticking out of the earth
where painted lines on the grass meet. Past it
chest-high chain link fences knot into a right angle
before the ground drops twenty feet down
a scrabbly bank on which lines cannot be drawn.
Past the parked cars an uneven stand of poplar and pine
waving like a tired family. Are they greeting us
or waiting for us to drive out of sight?
Then the foothills
where our preferences end.
How is it that mountains always seem to appear
by surprise? or a big word gathering quietly
in our ear, a thing without corners
growing inside a thing without corners,
a soccer ball knocking over a styrofoam cup of coffee
in the way a day may be suddenly knocked on its side
by a force that seems utterly foreign to it.
Crouching to save what’s left
I see the soccer field lines
as cave drawings of wordless heights fallen
on their sides and flattened, flag pinned to the top.
Their balance, while temporary, seems eternally sure.
One rubs his beak on the sun-warmed bark
like a blade on a whetstone.
The other chooses from the roughly
ten thousand sounds starlings are capable
of making, emitting a two-tone whistle
which mimics the sound of the second
half of a life-changing question.
If not for the wind chime’s song I would not have known
what I wasn’t seeing, so still it all seemed.
Only by not watching starlings could I
acknowledge the entire tree was moving
with the flexibility the most exact feeling or
thought must have to survive year after year
as it branches out, spreading across open space.
Ask a starling what the difference is between feeling and thought
who, stopping for minutes, may seem like they will remain
as long as they need, completely still, utterly certain
in each feather that everything in fact is moving
at the speed of the first half of a life-changing answer
Cars over a mile away on the interstate
like dust whispering.
Pots and dishes being put away
by someone with the kitchen window open.
The dishes want to make noises
that trees growing cannot make
that buds falling or sap forming
on the swelling peony bulbs
cannot make. We are here, they say,
though the seasons are beyond them.
We are still here.
We are here with you.
We are your voice.
So I took you up with me
to this chiseled place
where the clouds are closer
than their shadows
The whisper among the trees
a shout of bark and lichened rock
Mountainside trees stand differently
shaped by cascading arrangement
higher up where the wind is so loud
you no longer register it as sound
all I hear is the noise of trees bending
against each other, ajar to the invisible
like doors opening all around me
Translations from the English 