Cars over a mile away on the interstate
like dust whispering.
Pots and dishes being put away
by someone with the kitchen window open.
The dishes want to make noises
that trees growing cannot make
that buds falling or sap forming
on the swelling peony bulbs
cannot make. We are here, they say,
though the seasons are beyond them.
We are still here.
We are here with you.
We are your voice.
So I took you up with me
to this chiseled place
where the clouds are closer
than their shadows
The whisper among the trees
a shout of bark and lichened rock
Mountainside trees stand differently
shaped by cascading arrangement
higher up where the wind is so loud
you no longer register it as sound
all I hear is the noise of trees bending
against each other, ajar to the invisible
like doors opening all around me
It will hurt. The empty
pages of a lost book
you can never read again:
Now you know what it is
to write. To take a walk.
The boxwoods whisper
only the prurient details,
the red maples an advocacy
of lifting secrets suddenly
light as squirrels. Everything
that comes close to the light
scatters its shadow farther from
the shape of what we felt,
the dark fret where footprints
filigree the sorrowful soil
of another rich season.
Almost-full moon over skidding vapor trail.
A cat on the carpeted stairs.
A street-sign day with no direction.
A thousand years from now, the distance between last night
and tonight will be infinite. Unreachable, like the star
you pretend to hold at the end of the line I never wrote.
The last night of a waning moon is this night’s memory
cradling in its thin hand the entire darkness
of what we almost cannot see and so pretend
is not there even as what never happened
pulls us back like moonlight through winter trees.
Stay awake to watch. You have only twenty five thousand seconds
to read this before you wake up remembering that
I never wrote it, brimming with loss and a poem that
started with How does the waning moon still rise?
At the walnut tree’s highest reach
the day’s breeze sets twigs and thin branches
tense like frantic lost messages, last waves goodbye
but the slur slows through the random knots
and twists of the limb structure and’s spread asunder
further in by the outward-reaching limbs and widening
resolve of main branches to the absolute breaking
of leftover negative space: down where I am, humming
a tune I heard my beloved sing and will not forget,
just my voice in the quiet, here at the trunk where all is still.
Heavy clouds drag night’s crooked river.
The body of sleepless hours is not found.
Above the atmosphere of days
the heart’s stone direction passes unseen
though out alone, in the cool rain
my skin is burning with its re-entry.
Unseen rain four hours away on the black horizon.
While you focus on the empty branches above your head
the stars blur into overcast, a milky blue apology
the child within me will not accept.
The Cape Cod inlets flow through him
like the roots of these trees thread mountains.
He is a trick of the light, of beach grass and sand.
And now the days are too short, he will never get home.
Almost midnight, mild mid-December
Tell the day to let go of the lake.
It is deeper than even the night
and its stars are alive.
Down here in the heart nothing
is burning, even tragedy houses
the vulnerable gestures of life.
Come dawn the night and the day will
once again renew their tepid rivalry.
Miles away the mountain awakes
and realizes he is a lake, too.
Standing in the back yard
of my heart.
No value
in raking a yard of wet leaves!
Translations from the English 