Five mourning doves gather on close branches.
But the sky in the trees is too miserable for mourning.
Even the earth will not accept the night’s snow
which sits in clumps on the ground like oil on water.
It highlights fallen trees on the mountain slope
showing all the directions down can take you.
Between the shed and a crack in the clouds
two bluejays mate in a flurry on a fallen ladder.
There is the right way
[insert memory here, L]:
(there is this way, too)
The yard could be silver overcast sky
seen through the lean branches crossing.
I could stare all night, disappointed thinking:
where is that confounded moon?
The moon, that old toad palace, has seen it all and tonight
I am seeing the world with moon vision:
from my dark house it is a soft ghost
of all the worlds it has ever been to someone
Looking out at it from their window at night.
I don’t dare turn on a light; then it’s my ghost
that will be visible. Pausing outside my son’s door
I look in—the moon’s light freezes on his floor,
pretends it’s not there until I leave. By a lamp
near our bed, my wife plays guitar while I write,
Years from now, when this house has fallen in and
a squirrel skitters across a branch at this height
it will hear a soft music, some murmured words
and see the moon slide behind a gypsy’s leaf.
wise snow shovel waits:
sun slurs the mess awash down
hill: I sit, rest, read.
*
up with your child, night’s
anxious middle shows its calm
underside to you
First to hold the snow
Is the unspilled leaf, roof-bound,
Tin-eared, found groundless
Just put a fresh poem on the Brand New Stuff page, as we await the first light snowfall here in the shadow of the Blue Ridge mountains.
Translations from the English 