Under snow, under solid ground,
earth knits a fabric of mycelium,
bulb, the roots of chrysanthemum
and rose. The February landscape
shapes a shifting collage
of branch and cloud,
a splash of of jay-blue.
We stay secluded, painting
our lives with aplomb.
What gods do is make and let the pieces fall.
Billions of clocks on billions of beaches
turning as our hands move however they
move or our four legs or six or eight.
Billions of eyes in billions of deserts
move through their times or none and
we move our two legs or four or six or eight and
our hearts and chloroplasts, mycelium,
our many eyes or none.
Our structures crystalize, the plates
and hearts and chloroplasts and mycelium
subduct and bump as we rise and fall.
The structure of our crystals, how the plates
and all we do is an echo of clapping hands as we
subduct and bump and rise and fall.
With voices, silences, wavings of branches
Have patience, my friends.
There is no need to run,
to roar, to ricochet
from hard place to rock.
Practice being silent instead.
Sit still, hibernate your mind.
Go stand in the snow.
Listen to the stars.
How hard to see the pattern:
new friends who zoom
past for an hour.
How tall are they?
Do they wear shoes?
And who were they before—
before I knew them
in this peculiar way,
both tentative and sure.
A captain stands at the helm
in his ochre coat,
coaxing the wind
into the sails.
The artist in her rusty coat
coaxes the ochre
from the leaves.
Her easel is the helm
of a ship sailing
into the winter sky.
His coat of arms:
a purple coat
on an ochre field,
crowned with a silver helm.
too many suit coats,
too much ochre light,
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.