She gets up before everyone else, goes downstairs.
Turns on all the lights in the house — upstairs hallway,
Foyer, living room, dining room, kitchen. The back
Porch, the storage closet, the downstairs bathroom.
She stands and watches as the ghosts charge her,
Trying to find the chinks of darkness to escape into.
Always just as her fear begins to give in, they dissolve
In the light. A ragged pause, a short breath. Now
The rest of the family can be woken.
You remember the space between branches.
You remember being the last leaf.
You remember them slipping away in the wind
but the wand of the universe held you twisting.
You remember accepting the wind’s tongue
Making its voice the only voice others heard
And thought was yours.
And the wind’s tongue turned you over until
You were facing a different space between
Branches and saw twisting there one other
Leaf who had heard on stillest nights in early
Winter your true voice all along
Morning’s lit from underneath.
It’s the scrim of snow and grass’s gauze.
Melted (like me) by a mild
Morning, by your slightest warming.
From a mostly blue sky
A few stray flakes sink.
But the vultures don’t fall —
More weightless than air
Drifting with a gray horizon.
In the morning I woke deep in conversation.
The clock is a word. My wrist reaching for air
Is a word. Blankets the words I chose not to say.
The crow saws a gust of wind and it’s a word
The hole the woodpecker leaves is a word
He was looking for but could not find.
You are speaking to me like the wind speaks bird.
The starlings slur into the walnut tree’s crown
And crisply become its dreams. Transparent.
Not a team but sticking together for survival.
A murmur, against the gust. They say
The heart sleeps on the breath of a starling.
Such a small thing can wake it. What does
Someone else’s dream dreaming look like?
The crow’s wing feather’s spread like a saw.
A sliver of iridescence against the gust.
The zipper on the polka dot
Pajamas stuck halfway down, but far enough.
The sky’s skull softened and its blue eye grew.
Where vision is so vast there’s nothing more to see.
The bed of the earth extends to the ends
Of sheet-swept seas.The reasonings
Of mountains the resting place
For flocks of wishes in the empty trees,
The hollowness of hope their strength
To rise for nights of countless flight.
A rolling vessel rested in a calm, went on
Along the pale compass of your wrist.
It was never lie or lay.
There was never one direction.
Cicadas, deafening in the black oak.
But invisible. Turn the mind down:
It’s a late August still life.
Above the heart’s yard, all my chattering thoughts,
An invisible chorus, can’t travel the distance.
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 am the space before your voice is heard.
You’re the breeze that remembers every leaf’s name.
I am the weary road you know will take you home.
You are the river that sways the nimble oars.
A raspy sunrise. Whisper pleasant friction:
Your lips’ lines on my palm are not a fiction.
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 