On a Monday I promised you words
but became an overcast dusk.
You found the gap in me and looked
beyond the oracular swirl
where another sky floats, small and azure,
a Tuesday telling
leaning like a distant friend, bright
blue even when blue, beside
gold light on a companionable cloud.
Any enclosed space is a temple. While we turned away
the sky came down and delivered news of the moon,
it hangs there just above the trees, a white ceiling
glowing from the light of streetlamps below, it waits
folded like a newspaper delivered but not yet read,
thicker and more important seeming than it will be
when it’s picked through and thinned out
and in some cases like my dad used to do tied in knots
and thrown in the fireplace with kindling where
burning it rises through the cloud’s cold floor
and brings news of the hidden world to the new
moon in its temple of absence
For the first time you see the rough draft of your life
complete. You now know—it’s a whale; it’s a shark;
It’s a school of fish. Silt in a tidal pool.
It’s a shadow of the plane passing overhead,
of the cloud into which the plane disappears.
For a moment there is no telling which direction
it is going, but it is all there; or whether its depth
Is imagined but it is all there is. Imagined or not.
Translations from the English 