One word, it doesn’t matter which,
can be the pebble that sets off
an avalanche. Careful!
We could be buried until spring,
limbs tangled
under the snowy quilt.
One syllable older than language
can shock the snow awake,
recollecting its true nature:
to flow, to flood.
Listen: the brass bell fastened
to the neck of a sheep
has some other sheep’s tooth
for a clapper.
These noises we make
for each other & through each other,
A hollow hemlock:
peering out is more fun
than peering in.
I start looking
for a kite string —
the motionless vulture.
Thursday’s hurricane
sings softly
in my screen door.
The house he grew up in
long vanished,
he brings a lawn chair.
From the first fist into
the risen mass, the dough
is a-hiss. To live is
to master a liturgy
of winds — even yeast
knows this. Gas
whispers out through
a thousand pinholes as
I fold & press, fold
& press that limit-
less quilt.
I believe one thing
in my poems &
another in my prose,
like a window that opens
onto different yards
depending on the time of day
or the presence of other
open windows, like a road
that leads sometimes into town
& sometimes deeper
into the forest, where
this morning the raindrops
glistened on every
bare twig, a ruffed grouse
throbbed in the leftover
corners of night like
This is what happens
when you start making up
your own mind:
the tree drops its tantalizing fruit,
sheds its leaves, & the woodlot
shrinks around it
until it stands alone in a line
of fence posts & telephone poles,
trembling neurons sifting the wind for sparrows.
You become as gods,
endlessly bifurcating,
simple as stinkhorns.
In place of paradise
there’s a field, a pasture,
a dishy blankness of sky.
Screech owl at dawn
& a great-horned owl at dusk.
All day long, just words.
Skid marks where a rabbit
slid into the ditch at dawn—
no shadows then.
Marooned in the snow,
the old whitewashed springhouse
is anything but white.
Where deer once stepped,
dinner-plate-sized craters
brimming with new snow.
When the scholar’s eyesight fades,
what good are his books?
His library turns as unreadable
as Lascaux: scriptless drama of shapes
on the walls of a cave, the artifice
unglossed within the viscera
where the quarry – tissue
of allusions – still bristles
with bookmarks. That flux of the world
of becoming: to capture is
to kill it. Decipherment leads to loss.
The dance must be primary, he wrote.
I acted briefly as amanuensis,
lent him my eyes for a paper he had to give.
Bending to my task, I felt
of little use, a cheap fiction.
Porcupine,
do the sapless twigs of winter
taste any different on the tree
you’ve just girdled,
this waste of a pine?
Its whited branches light
the grove like candles,
like candelsticks.
But you with your poor eyesight
must favor the dark: hollows & cavities,
the undersides of things,
unchewed bark.
This pine was unwise to arm itself
with such soft & succulent spines.
It did nothing but hiss
like a gnawed-on road-salted tire.
I wake at 4:00
but my right thumb keeps twitching
as if in its own dream.
On the plowed driveway’s
hard-packed snow, three dark cigars:
Coyote was here.
Winter palimpsest:
inside each white-tailed deer track,
a coyote print.
Rabbit tracks
go into the laurel thicket
& don’t come out.
A rubbing sound
on the underside of the floor
as something turns over.
Hurtling down the hill
Long after I get back,
my frozen breath is still dripping
from my beard.
Little smoky thumb, how
I’ve missed sucking on you!
My head floats on its stem
like a flower that’s just been pollinated.
In the seven years
since I broke the habit,
every cell in my body has been
replaced at least once, but
my fingers still remember
exactly what to do, juggling
the huggermuggery of matchbook
& rolling paper, ashtray & ash.
What other parts of my new/old body
have inherited secret flaws?
With growing detachment
I watch the thing go gray
Let us imagine a body full of thinking members.
The uterus knew what I
& the doctor did not.
It threatened mutiny.
The mind is more than brain,
I’d say, the body’s
a net of nerves,
which makes the womb a net
within a net. Mine wasn’t
about to let its catch be killed
when the baby still sat
ass-downward & they talked
about turning it. Something,
everything said NO.
I chose the Caesarian.
When they went in, they found me