yet to come, they will persist, contained in a memory—
roused from slumber, awakened, yet carried on in a dream
of dreaming.
***
Curvature
A glacier
peels from the eaves
into watery windows.
Dripping sun melts what’s left.
If I look
I can see a robin’s eggshell
cracked by contrails.
Stars everywhere
reveal mostly the general homogeneity
of the universe, yet individuals
and constellations attest
to the stubborn persistence
of difference.
The Congresswoman’s slope
of recovery remains steep;
Egyptian skulls remain also at risk.
The revolution has come,
but where will it go?
Today is warm,
relatively; whenever ice falls
my skittish dogs jump.
(The photo experiment
interrupted by war to end war
shows inconstant starlight
bent towards an eclipsed sun—
now imagine
if the light couldn’t escape.)
Last night
I stood in the north doorway
looking out;
an encompassing darkness (outlining the arc
of an event horizon)
enclosed an unending Abyss
and stars in the trees.
A single star
fell through the branches—so quickly
I barely could breathe.
***
Northern Night
Last night the Aurora Borealis tinted the sky
with cool firelight, so tonight
I am hoping to see what I missed.
The moon, rising, is but a fingernail clipping
carrying an empty placenta elucidated by darkness.
I will walk around, go home,
perhaps even go out again up the hill before light
to stand alone in the field
where my brothers and I once powdered clay pigeons
or missed, pausing just long enough after
to hear the shot spray like hail in the woods.
***
Once on a Blue Moon
12/31/2009
Full moonlight
reveals thin lines
of trees on blue snow.
My cat sits
on the couch
at the window,
a silhouette blacker
than all outdoors.
The coal fire at my back
makes a blue flame
licking the interstices
of feeling,
but I am neither desirous
nor disheartened
knowing I am an interval
too, by turns warm
or cold, light
or shadow.
***
Moment
Deer meet
in deep woods, content
to mingle idly and ruminate
while the world fills with snow.
Brittle as rice paper,
leaves quiver on an oak tree
overhead. The deer
scratch a fragile surface, revealing
mast and lacelike leaves
not yet quite decomposed.
Purposeful, intent,
mindful of someone’s shooting
far ahead,
they pause to look up, mouths agape,
and taste the bitter air.
***
Our Walk, First Thing This Morning
We turn off the road
and go down into the field
where deer have imprinted the ground;
I feel their presence to the right,
hear the soft sibilance of hide and stiff hair
before I see them: sleek bodies, dark and half formless,
slicing through still frozen goldenrod.
Beau sees them then too, and disappears into the hillside
before I can call him back, but soon returns
to lead us again across the high ridge towards home.
I see at last a funneling grapevine
grown into dead shadow on the shed roof behind the high barn
and then the fox, standing sideways, looking startled,
a hundred paces straight ahead.
The dogs, making chase, conform to a line of three
leaving, one after the other, in ascending order of speed.
Leaving as well, last and most slowly, I follow.
***
Parting
for Tian
At the first concert we smiled to each other
and though I did not think of love,
I thought of you after. Later, in the market,
we met again, and again you asked me my age
and told me your name, beginning
my puzzlement and embarrassment.
The night following a movie I wanted to kiss you
you shyly giggled, so we parted
shaking hands instead. When I arrived the next day
on your threshold, you closed your door, asking I not linger
to listen while you practiced your violin.
Now it seems we have been parting ever since.
After our last concert we stood in the spring snow;
I watched your hair fill up with stars
and desired you stay, later regretting
I did not tell you before you decided to leave.
In the days to come you will go far away from here.
I will envision you among the cherry blossoms
on the Potomac, or walking a street in New York City.
You say you have not made up your mind
but I know you have, so even though I search all of China
I’ll likely not see you again.
***
Aftermath
The time will come
to step through the snow
going the way of the fields
and woods.
The dogs will plow
furrows to walk in
or walk behind me in mine.
Pine branches
touching the ground
might spontaneously spring
free, or be actuated
by the movements of perched crows,
all the while in stillness
for miles around
I’ll detect not a whiff
of the wind prying tonight
at the eaves.
***
Snow Moon
for Carl
Printing herringbones, I traced
our halting half-steps up through trees
and stopped where they stopped in open snow
to look afield and review the far wood
cut by the clean curve of a meadow
where, in a perfect world, either of us might build
a home, raise crops, chickens, a family.
Though I had come to see the hunger moon
and to see in the blown snow
some evidence of our passing, I found
no sign of the moon, or of our selves.
On the far side of the wood
I put aside thoughts of life’s temporality
and left my mark as best I could,
etching the snow with a memory
of the pure meadow line to my rear
before turning for town, stopping once
to watch the whole moon emerge from a field
lined with row upon row
of perfectly rendered, perfectly concentric
corn stubble.
***
The Leonid Meteor Shower
for Robbie
The sky is streaked
as in a Japanese print, raining meteors
over the pro
w of the barn.
Breathless, I press my nose to the kitchen window,
fogging cold glass.
A moment ago, dizzy, with the top of my head
open to the infinite vacuum above,
all I could think of was getting inside.
Now I wish I had persevered, for comfort
seems every bit the barrier to perception as observing.
Still, if Heisenberg were here to see these flitting flameouts,
to revel in each chance commingling of potential and destiny,
even he would witness with perfect clarity and wonder:
What took eons to arrange finishes in a flash.
***
Shy of Heaven
We do not commonly talk
of animals being,
not as in humans being,
or more than seldom consider
the flicker of awareness behind the eyes of a dog,
even a beloved pet,
as anything other than contentment
or appreciation of our being with them
in an ever-fleeting present.
Accepting it as a gift, their being
allows us to view our surroundings
as intimates;
the world becomes what we see in their eyes.
A leaf falls, a squirrel flips
through a canopy of trees;
we look up in rapt attention and wonder
with sudden, considerable desire.
So being, we become more than before,
still animal, yet more—
considering the chance a squirrel
might fall, but wanting to see it also continue
leaping branch to branch to branch.
***
Tenuousness
for Edith
i
Maybe
Our being is too largely illusive;
I edge to the gorge
And even then the rocks seem unreal.
Still I feel the pull of your hand
In mine
As you reach for the abyss
To pluck asters from the shale wall.
This morning the dogs and I walked in the woods.
I thought of you only
After hearing two raucous crows
Reconnoitering above. One,
Then another, still in my memory,
Skim the bare treetops,
Becoming again equal parts sky
And fog.
ii
From the gorge’s edge
The rocks below seem inviting and unreal. Still
I shudder, remembering
Your hand in mine.
I took the dogs for a walk in a misting wood.
Watching two crows skim the bare treetops,
I thought of you.
iii
Belatedly it occurs to me
The rocks seem unreal.
I overlook the gorge
As if to attempt faith
Only to recoil again from the pull
Of what argues against me.
I think of you holding my hand,
Reaching into the abyss
To pick asters from the shale wall.
iv
This morning I took the dogs for a walk.
I thought of you all the while.
Above us the raucous krruck krruck
Of two crows skimming bare treetops kept coming
Then going across an unseen, fogged-over sky.
Until their voices disappeared too.
***
Riding Blind At Night
I stay to the road by tilting my head back,
following a course revealed as though reflected
in the pale river of sky narrowly wending above this dug way.
The analog signal transmitted from fork to fingers
picked up and transferred by the front tire’s uncertain contact
with earth, allows me to feel the unseen pressed surface
hemmed in by ditches, steep banks, and overarching treetops
constricting light from the stars to a trickle.
The transition from night to pure dark makes me think
this place is a very Valley-of-Death cut into the bulk of a hill
where all manner of beast—bobcat and bear
and who knows what else—lie lurking, waiting to pounce.
And yet, apprehension turns to mild bemusement
as halfway up the hill some insubstantial critter approaches from behind
and attaches its presence to mine like a sidecar, pacing doggedly
with a multiplicative badgering patter of tiny fast feet
while I continue to churn the crank slowly
round and round, pulling so hard on the handles it is a wonder
the bicycle does not perform a back flip revolving about me
on its own as I strain to climb the steep grade.
Ever gradually, the summit gives up the advantage
and I outrace my companion to where earth and tree shadows fall away, yielding sky
and level high ground.
At last, I stand on the pedals and coast, transecting
cool hayfields, breathing thin air infused with the scent of cut grass.
Rolling towards a still undefined distance, I imagine deer in the impervious darkness
lifting their heads, curiously watching what must surely appear to them
a mere apparition of some strange, gliding beast.
***
Three Crows
On stiff stick legs
the first walks across the yard;
the second flies to the shagbark and lights
on a high hanging crooked branch;
the third, perched in a sumac
between lawn and back field,
finally launches on a single strong wing-beat,
landing with a sideways fanning flourish
amid scattering jays, squirrels,
broken nutshells.
As they regroup,
the squirrels and jays
seem somehow less than the blackness of crows—
blotting patches of green grass and snow,
making silhouettes suggestive of nothing else
but what exists, for a time, where it will.
***
I Went for a Walk
I went for a walk with the dogs
along the path at the edge of the field
looking out over the winding road
with the wind at my back before turning,
shouldering into the breeze to check on a nest-box,
lifting the slanted front to inspect for fresh interest inside.
I pull a length of old web from the oblong entrance hole
before closing the front down again, walking backwards
along a broken fence-line to appraise the far hills across the valley,
turning about in time to see Beau running, whipping
about like a limber whippet turning
on the same reversing bend taken two seconds before by the fox
he pursued; now as I, entranced by the fluid arc
of their twined horizontal tumbling/thrashing through weeds,
still pursue the moment we first saw him, before the fox turned away.
And here I laugh, left wondering where that fox is going,
taking both my dogs along for the exercise.
I imagine them escaped to untamed fields and woods
where in body and mind I not as certainly follow, stepping carefully
to avoid trampling May apples
going down a steep sloping bank to a muddy bottom
where imprinted paw-prints climb inexorably on
to the next hayfield, leading nowhere.
Now here, I remember the sudden near orchard whiteness
while still admiring the Indian blush of a far hillside
and
turning again, a last time towards home,
discover bitten rhubarb amid a patch of shiny grass in the back yard
where the wind stroked it down.
A spruce tree standing just inside the profuse and imperfectly kempt lawn
sprouts small purple seed cones, which I move closer to see
(as well note) with an innocent intention to catalogue all
for sometime further on.
***
Midnight on Moss Lake
A scream pierced the quiet.
The moon lay flat on the sky, flatter still
on the calm water below.
Two boys camping where prohibited
built no fire, fearing discovery if not flames
in the tinder-dry needles and grass.
The scream came from a woman being murdered,
or a bobcat prowling not too far away,
each possibility a delicious affirmation of a reason to fear.
Years later, I took a young woman to the same place
to see the same moon reflecting just as flat on the water.
I related the tale of the lake as we walked
down the boardwalk, supported on a floating peat
mattress of pitcher plants, marsh marigolds, sticky sundew
and wild cranberries, both living and gone—a world decomposing
below our feet, drowning in a mire of all; eventually,
I whispered, only the bog would remain, enclosing entirely
the water’s shrinking edge. Already elsewhere
poplars grew in the sedge as though planted on solid ground.
We stopped. The still water waited as ever,
dark and depthless. No-one knew we were there—
making believable the suggestion I could
slit her belly, send her buoyant-less body sliding
off the end of the boardwalk
into a glacial pool legend claims has no bottom;
she might not resurface for five thousand years.
I would throw out the knife, hear it splash in the dark,
and that would be the end of her.