Dandelion
The spokes come off the wheel
and the invisible vessel keeps moving
to a hundred destinations
At each a wheel the size of an eye
looks in a hundred directions
and the world is big again
Dandelion
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Translational Velocity, Full Moon, Mid-Afternoon in Early June
Translational Velocity, Full Moon, Mid-Afternoon in Early June
It is more than how quickly these lines reach you.
It is that they move you. How through them
You change position in time. I used to think love
was the measure of an object’s rotational inertia,
Well not exactly in those words, but how things
in a given state should stay in that state without end
But I was mistaken, that measure is simply mass
as it spins or doesn’t, assuming further it has a center
Around which to spin and absolutely nothing
that could make it wobble or twist. Your hands
And wrist gently, impossibly, your neck and jaw
set the stillness spinning, under the hidden moon
And the leaves with their riot of turning stems
in the slight breeze and the alternating paths
They allow the light to the pavement
beneath the sycamore limbs, as we stand still
Moving on the inside, or move over time, love is the change
In direction or speed, love is the inconsistent
liveliness, the moving picture, projected on any surface,
love is just keeping up with it, keeping up.
from Spring Songs (12)
from Spring Songs (12)
12.
Midnight. In a corner of a room
a few days away, a half century crouches.
In the dark the corners of the years round up
certainty into the smooth black mast
against which direction flaps without words,
a trunk removed from its roots.
In the morning it is the maple and its shadow
unwinding along riverways of air and light.
The maple is old but the leaves always young,
the hours of the year, the half million
minutes through which we extend and end,
define the canopy of entirety itself by the shape
of what we miss. We shed time but are shaped by it;
wine on a quiet night, before crickets.
Dark Reactions
Dark Reactions
In the night the unseen stretches out.
Grass growing just before dawn.
I think I see the moon in my window
but it is the ceiling lamp’s reflection.
At lights out, the windowframe relaxes.
We spread downhill, and into the air a giant
centimeter. The real moon shakes hands
with every cloud. Even without eyes it
does not miss a single one. When morning
light crawls down from the treetops
and you are out with the dogs the grass
cannot believe how much you have grown.
Nothing gets done by paying attention.
from Spring Songs (10)
from Spring Songs (10)
10.
No moon. God has no early evening plans.
Oak and walnut leaves spread across the neighborhood,
A planet whirs like a lime between the new leaves.
A bright spot. A memory. Gone in the morning.
If there really is a time to be still it is now: a cell
splits, reforms, comes whole, continues,
is cut out, spins like a leaf into a space
of no-being, hard matter. Alone on a bed
you will suffer the speed of being observed
as from afar while the world spins, they lean away,
your loved ones, into the dark, come round again.
In the mean time, when your light winks or is blocked
by the slightest breeze against a leaf, we will know
and run with you to keep you in sight, at the speed
of the day’s suffering itself to be tracked by shadows,
and together find the time to be still.
from Spring Songs (9)
from Spring Songs (9)
9.
The weather came from the east this time
as low as the sun in the west and the sun
And the weather crossed swords over young leaves
glowing green against gray. And the tulips held.
The gray face came down and looked into the street’s eyes
and this was the first of May. Swallows follow a storm
like they have just won an argument with God
and the prize, so small we can’t see it, is everywhere.
The Roots
The Roots
Under your house, in the middle of the night
the roots are spreading across your foundation.
The roots are not a solid base for the visible,
they have never claimed to be that, they have
never even spoken to you. What roots do
is reach out for available space, where roots reach
Is a place you cannot see but which you feel
pulled towards but you are not being pulled,
you are reaching further and further. Up above
your head in the unseen inside you are also reaching.
In the middle of the day the sky’s foundation
is laid again and you are reaching across it
without knowing because you are distracted
by an oak tree’s afterthought ankling out of the earth
And back in where the world is constantly displaced
by the unseen middle, unstraight path.
Tonight, with Nothing
Tonight, with Nothing
Tonight, with nothing to say, with all the absent things
crowding around me like a teapot with a parade
of friendly continental guards and crows encircles
tea from China, with all present concerns poured
into an empty cup and spilled for good luck
before drinking, with a mild wind from the south
whispering threats in another language to the last
of the hard-packed plowed snow on the streets,
I remind myself of nothing, and the long envelopment,
and the cup filling with jasmine and spring, and earth.
#FullMoonSocial // Overcast Full Moon Night, After Snow
Overcast Full Moon Night, After Snow
Rain melts snow then turns
to snow: earth slides soft
then stiffens and stills
and disappears under new snow:
Clouds ride endless wind
always leaving: unseen
and unmoved by the mess
and distance, something
of you and I makes its
own slow circle above
Another Reason Why I Wish the House Next Door Had Not Sold, Though It Is Still Abandoned
Another Reason Why I Wish the House Next Door Had Not Sold, Though It Is Still Abandoned
Out my second story window I would see great branches
flowing from an unseen maple’s trunk, striding on the air
to the roof of the house next door.
A month ago two men climbed the tree
to the roof. I watched them slowly saw, saw away
anything they could reach. The new view’s an old metal roof
snow sliding down its creases, winter’s white sky
and a single wren on the tip of tender branch up
where saws could not reach. I used to see squirrels,
a dozen in an hour, traveling branches like highways;
now while I don’t see anything I still hear them
in the gutter over my own window. But I keep looking
where they used to be: the deepest view an empty one
Translations from the English 