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
Mountains bow low when the day stands up.
Immediately the sun is at our house
preparing to knock – the maple spreads its arms.
Later, we wake among stilled stars and golden silence.
Watching the moon
through a hole
in an ash leaf
*
What a caterpillar
didn’t eat frames a
thousand years
*
This poem is a leaf
where what’s missing
reveals the other side and
what’s left behind is
bound to fall
Moon
Stone in the sky
tumbles through centuries
of clouds smoothing out
absence with its presence
Maple
Just past their peak, wind-lifted
and let go like a child flung off a swing
higher than they have ever been
Meanwhile on the ridge line the trees
link arms and begin the walk home
Now that it is done I should know who I am
and why I did it and who I did it for now
that it is arrived the end should be a secret
passage back to the beginning and this
unfinished space a private garden at world’s
end and the buried seeds break anew now that
destruction’s heat has called them open and when
things begin that are unexpected we should have
expected them back here at the beginning knowing
everything that follows but because nothing
follows the end I should know I’m not there now
that it is done and where are you now that
It is done you should know who you are
Deer have ventured out through thinning trees
into thickening traffic. Men in trucks gentle them
to the breakdown lane with shovels. The last leaf’s
twisting stem is the voice of the deer in November.
With a moon not yet full behind a sky not yet clear
a glowing handprint floats over the house
holds emptiness like a drifting welcome
closed to nothing always open to you
Winter begins in the stones. In a dream the sky house
gets closer as if it is trying to hear a secret or tell me one
but when I can read its lips I see it is just pretending.
In the car: stones from a trip to the beach.
A thousand miles from where we found them
for months they have rested in a drink holder
with no discernible nature acting on them,
no car tides or car gulls have hampered their stillness.
Now when we pick them up on a drive we marvel
at how cold they are on this mild first day of November.
You can press them to your hand, your neck, your cheek
and they stay cold. They are telling me a secret
without moving their lips or pretending to tell me anything.
They are coming closer without moving, like snow clouds.
Translations from the English 