Frost flourishes in the shade like flowers in the sun–
the gain may be temporary but isn’t the temporary
gain all that can be measured and for frost after all
isn’t the temporary a permanence itself? External
conditions set it stony and sharp, a marker
of the cold we feel—things being different
it might be the drop of dew in which
you glimpse the moon you’d otherwise miss
Late night walks are making more sense
as I realize how little of my life
I am really seeing. Making it home each night
through the black ink of every word of hope
and doom engraved into the emptiness
surrounding me—isn’t it much better
practice than bounding about in daylight
thinking I am understanding everything?
In the dark the actual tree spreads without end,
across time and space, and I begin to sense
that my blindness also travels a route
set in deep earth, exposed to the sky.
When the moon sinks low in the western sky
I pour a day’s memories into its gold cup
as the old rules state. Evening is cooling off
but mild, as if between myself and
the stars there is an owl flying away while at the same
time a distant unknown bird is approaching.
When they pass each other I am finding the key
in my pocket and feeling blindly for the lock.
When the cup is locked in the cupboard
of the past for another day, in the quiet house
I take out the moments I withheld from the moon
and place them in the dark above me: your hand
on my arm, your head against my shoulder.
The phone ringing. The living warmth of you
like a foreign language I can suddenly read
as words pour into the room and we listen.
Roads diminish and clarify. People disappear.
The skunk is just being himself on the edge of the dark sidewalk.
On a certain night even he can see the dog-star.
Not shaking off the weather. All last summer the stooped old lady
laid her traps and could not flush him out of hiding. All summer
I spent mornings freeing trapped squirrels and possums
before the noon sun dehydrated them. She never came out
to see and neither did the skunk in her crawlspace. Now, crossing
the road, he looks up to the house as if remembering
or as if seeing through walls and latticework: here’s a place
I could make a home beneath. Here is a place I can depart
and come back to. A place I can impart the secret:
How to disappear but never leave. How to settle in
when all you will do at this age is preparation for leaving.
I would kneel with you any hour and pray to find that place.
If we wait long enough the wind will move the invisible aside.
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.
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.
Translations from the English 