With eyes closed I can hear you smile.
Your voice a place I know my way around.
Woodpeckers say goodnight the strangest way
And other birds of winter appear as singular
Leaves of gray, blue, gold on the trees
We can only see through their nakedness.
I drop your eyelids’ map of dreams:
Everything you are I still don’t know
Runs through my veins
Like the flight patterns of birds
that never have to know the route
I have to learn quiet again,
I told the yellow grass
By the library’s stone wall.
The sun shimmered,
Not understanding. November
Shrugged and disrobed.
The pen you
Gave ran out
Of ink and I
ran out of words
The end is artificial. We always knew
And put it there to make the shadow
Of what follows seem smaller
*
In the end’s private library
Past volumes beyond count
Each with only the last leaf
Tucked between dusty boards
The end finds a bookmark
*
The end is a bridge
We have crossed before
From the other side
So long has passed all
That’s the same is the bridge
They have argued before: now heart
And mind walk hand in hand,
In the skunkworks of autumn,
Where the moon’s rise and fall
Is one heartbeat charted
On the night’s sheet.
It moves with such patience
We almost think our dreams
And our days are walking with us
And not staring as we pass by.
I am the baby whose first word was a laugh.
At fifty years old my heart grew by half.
For a while yet the walnuts
Will drop to the earth at night
Like exclamations about what
We forgot to do and now
It’s too late to do anything
But remember. Then
Next week a wind in the maple
Will turn the sky to stained glass
As what’s forgotten again
Again takes root
The invisible tribe sweeps through the sleepers
And for that moment their dreams lay in their hands
Like musical instruments.Who will you wake with it?
Of course your dream was never alive;
The hole you thought was a mortal wound–
Place your mouth there and
A note carries through the night, brushes
The underbellies of leaves and reaches those
Who travel without being heard. Some will
Stop, and look down at the nautilus in their hands
They only now remember carrying, they will put
It to their ears, and hear the same sound,
And while the invisible tribe slips away,
begin moving silently your way against their new shadows.
Every wind is coming from the past. It began earlier
And it may enliven even the browned-out ground level
Settling of the sycamore’s spring, its old news
Swirling at my ankles at the edge of the library lot.
What did I forget to return? What crisp regret?
2:33 in the morning.
The owl screeches like a thought’s hinges.
One that keeps opening just a crack
but nobody steps through.
I turn over my pillow, squint into the dark
yard, knowing nothing will clarify.
Whatever you are thinking
I am thinking, too.
Translations from the English 