I crack the window, listen:
What message can this cold wind carry
but this breeze won’t tilt my room’s way and come in
I reach out it slips through my fingers
Unkind even to the moon it has taken a little off the top
Diminished month sent howling through the pines
Unauthored, not meant to be read –
or merely hurrying by, a forgotten promise?
The trees have long been silent
the strongest wind coaxes only a hum
Or hiss but sometimes
outside my window the downed leaves
Still murmur like a river
calling a kingfisher home
Dimming roof. A scratch in the window
autumn’s spiders’ work can’t touch
catches January sun’s sleepy look back
Way up a contrail drifts
over the roof like a lost spider’s thread
missing the tree by miles
No bird in the bare trees this evening
No rain or wind, no snow’s cushioned silence.
The twisted branch is capped, the sap beneath waiting
The clouds are without qualities this mild lonely night
In hours with wind from the north their drift would be enough
Even the moon behind them is too bland
Oh where is the weather to absorb sorrow
This vacant dark not empty only reflects
The bottle-less nights dead-man’s-float on the drifting water
the moon’s cup fills with early January
until it is sideways with days but nothing spills out
these brown maple leaves hanging on by mistake
like old hands brush against me
I know them but they do not recognize me
but still they reach out: old moon keep your drink
I do not wish to embrace you
My mother shoos the fox from her grave
she is not ready for the sweeping day
the orioles nest far from this evening
above the red dust if only one would call
a silence the size of a tree
through the root’s center the river will come
just under the bark of time
something slowly moves the other way
In the sky of dreams we are the clouds
until the density of images coalesces to spirit
And we fall
resolve back to solid waking drop by drop in the dark.
So, no twister ripped reality and separated us.
I did not run through rubble yelling your name.
Worse, I dreamed of the waking in anxiety and
That I lay listening to the rain speaking on the sill’s other side
This meaning without moving to remember it though knowing
What I wouldn’t get back if I didn’t write this poem.
Then when the last drop of waking fell before consciousness
Wiped it away I reached for the scattered thoughts as if for you
Sustained love is love’s
Only achievement: to stay
Beyond memory
*
start this year bare tree
grow quiet inside yourself
choose when to open
Happy 2014, everybody.
Most of our time together is spent in these words,
The hours of writing and reading
And our house under the roof of your eyes
Is the place we will never come home to
Because we have never left it because
This is not a place but a time we share
Unaware of each other holding
The other sometimes of the wrist of mind
Resisting departure: have you felt that
And the memory of these words that may come
At any moment and at every moment
Is our time and the closest thing to permanence
Is that these words are waiting for us
from 20 Poems & Other Translations from the English.
In the blurring-by tree I saw the hawk turn its head.
This distance I’ve come to bring you home to find I no longer lived
In there. Well we walked arm in arm to the seats on the wall.
On the other side of the planet nobody called in.
Stood up by the upside down world. By the static sigh
Which could mean anything. By the eye which does not
Recognize. And this way back where the rocks weep ice
Is the only way which is forward
This brief response direct as a laugh because it was
Though you were unable to say my name or know
Who I was though you knew me through some tone or gesture
Is better than a memory of a laugh though the tunnel of grief is long
This goodbye where we are past the why to the final silent letter.
Translations from the English 