A dark rose blooms in the far corner of the month.
Ceiling-fan shadows migrate across an upside-down world
For long moments after the switch has been flipped.
The continuous migration, slowing. That’s our life.
–then everything else which turns off at night
is the switch that turns on the crickets
is there a thing at all in cricketsong
that means I remember
that bridges the slow heaving wave
of frozen ground between years
is there anything
by which they know they go on
do they need to when they hear
with their legs by which they leap only forward
and sing with their wings which cannot take them backward
what else must a cricket do to prove it needs
no memory
*
behind my house at night I forget
I am in a city the song is so loud
like the earth breathing in and out
the owl marking his territory in the pitch dark
is absorbed into the song it seems impossible
there could be as many crickets on the ground
as there are cricket voices in the air
till the sun climbs over a rock and shuts them off
in the morning which is the switch
for ten thousand starlings to fill the space
with another season–
Attending a Poetry Festival I Wonder What A World Full of Poets Would Be Like, And As I Leave the Building Into the Mid-Winter Afternoon Air I Hear the Late Migration Of a Canada Goose
In a room of a hundred poets my ego diminishes. My name grows so small
I can no longer find it on the program. But it turns out I am everywhere,
in every poem I hear, someone is calling my name! In the parking lot, in the cold air
above me a lone goose is calling as he flies, looking for companions traveling
his way. I look—no, he is not alone after all. There is one, silent, flying beside him.
Someone tell the two Canada geese
flying up the street at quarter past nine
this November evening they are heading
to West Virginia
Translations from the English 