Dark clouds over Buck Mountain.
It will rain.
More sugar-maple leaves on the ground than on the trees.
The oaks and popples are turning.
Soybean fields amber, hay fields cut and green.
Luke’s old milking shed is falling apart.
It’s just a storage shed now,
with the old SURGE and AG JOURNAL signs rusting on the wall
and the little lightning rods standing bravely on the roof.
Last year, a young man took the bend in the road too fast
and the laws of physics being what they are,
he glanced off a telephone pole and ran into the shed.
And died. One of the dead
elms has fallen. Now it’s raining,
and taking pity on the dog, I turn.
Sumac is mostly red along the east side of the road.
Not even granite is permanent—
it crumbles and weathers into parts.
And isn’t it a fine thing
that nothing stays the same?
Time is after all unsynchronized space,
shifting into shapes that cannot last.
Therefore, do not fret.
Keep your touch light,
or maybe don’t touch at all.
Simply breathe.
You’d think we were waiting for bad news.
A red-haired woman in Raggedy Ann leggings
holds on her lap an enormous hoop;
she is quilting on black satin: golden stars, a silver moon.
The village celebrity, solemn and tweedy, aware of his beard,
discreetly refolds The New York Times.
A woman even older than I sits still with her eyes closed,
plastic shopping bags around her feet.
Maybe she is listening to the music.
How far do you think we could get,
all of us together, if we had
a pickup truck and a sandwich or two?
The town crier in his cowboy suit
and yellow hardhat stomps in, announcing
The world is all f***ed up and it pisses me off.
The tire man says Yes, yes, isn’t that so,
The unpruned fuchsia in its faded pot
is a mess of sticks, spotty leaves, a few stunted buds.
It is not a malleable plant;
it’s fussy about water and light.
Not like the daffodils. Every spring—
flood or freeze or April snow—
they push up through thickets of grasses
and edge the lawn with yellow and white.
I expect there is some liberty
in taking what is given, staying deep,
blooming from the settled bulb.
A robin is building her nest
outside the window of the room
where I write, shaping the sticks
and grass with her muddy breast.
In the budding lilac, her mate sings.
If fates and jays agree, nestlings shall fledge,
fragile as imagined wings.
His shoulder bones sharp,
he is a lion drinking
from a white clay bowl.
There is no painting here.
No artist prepared
a palette, a canvas.
No ecstasy or agony
of creation.
Nothing was lugged
to a gallery.
No one returned,
disappointed, to a garret.
It was never displayed
in hallway, drawing room,
library, museum.
It is not real, except
as silence, out
of the reach of sense,
a whim, a dream.
The birds have gone.
No golden-slippered egret,
no blue-eyed cormorant,
no wading stork shielding
dark water with her wings.
Silence is absolute.
Mangroves
are weary, dusty.
In the fetid pools,
mosquitoes awaken.
Already the air
is thick with heat.
Alligator spoor—
dinosaur track,
tail-drag—
marks the muddy flats
It will return. It is
returning. Six o’clock
and already the winter candle
light is not a sharp
circle on the table.
It was a tough
winter, a tough fall.
Four dead, my own
new scars, the surprise
of seventy years.
I’m needing morning
bird song—a robin,
a cardinal. I’m needing
good news. And today
the reversal—just as the sun
is warming through the wind,
At the end, abundance
of distinction. Like human
hands, no duplication.
Every loss a loss.
The chambered nautilus expands,
seals off each outgrown space,
and yet the empty rooms remain
as spiraled witness to the change.
The growing shell is not a burden
to the wanderer inside
who uses it to stay afloat,
and when it’s time, to dive.
And thus may we use all we’ve known
and all that we’ve believed
to navigate the sea we’re in
as long as we’re alive.
Meanwhile, the wrens who nest
in the wooden pole that holds up
the clothesline are feeding their hatchlings.
All day long, they come and go,
poke bugs into the dark hole
where the babies eat, and grow.
The dog barks on the porch.
A great-crested flycatcher rests
for a minute on a blooming branch
of dogwood. I sit on an overturned
flowerpot in the garage, watching
through a dirty window. A chipmunk
squeals and runs away. A breeze
flashes through the grass. A red-eyed
vireo sings on and on.