from the sunsets
to the rubbish on the Harbor bottom
fermenting so bubbles
of the gas formed from the putrefaction
keep coming up and you watch them break
on the surface and imagine the odor
which is true
at low-tide that you can't stand the smell
if you live with the Harbor Cove or the Inner
Harbor to your side
Out walking in the frozen swamp one grey day,
I paused and said, ‘I will turn back from here.
No, I will go on farther--and we shall see.’
The hard snow held me, save where now and then
One foot went through. The view was all in lines
Straight up and down of tall slim trees
Too much alike to mark or name a place by
So as to say for certain I was here
Or somewhere else: I was just far from home.
A small bird flew before me. He was careful
To put a tree between us when he lighted,
And say no word to tell me who he was
Who was so foolish as to think what he thought.
He thought that I was after him for a feather--
The white one in his tail; like one who takes
Everything said as personal to himself.
The same leaves over and over again!
They fall from giving shade above
To make one texture of faded brown
And fit the earth like a leather glove.
Before the leaves can mount again
To fill the trees with another shade,
They must go down past things coming up,
They must go down into the dark decayed.
They must be pierced by flowers and put
Beneath the feet of dancing flowers.
However it is in some other world
I know that this is the way in ours.
Laugh lines and signs of failing liver
Wrinkles and knobby belly
They say one thing
‘The child has turned old
The child has turned into a crocked man
And he crumples up like a dry leaf
On the dance floor
Ask the janitor for a shovel
Scoop up that dry corpse from the dance floor
Do it quickly
Do it fast
Let the music last
And last
the feather-hook is a seed spiralling in the breeze,
a false signal
it mocks the mayhem of the caught moth down to
its nub stone
its plane is a shell network of dried skin, veined even
it has a spine of sorts
it mocks the mayhem of the caught moth down to
its nub stone
steady summer rain &
an old swayback farmhouse
by the road
bare winter sapling
the floor of the tiny birdhouse
falling out
What space
is left
for time to flow freely through
when,
with each stretched instant,
small bits of me
die
falling away
to fill the graves
of unknown heros
and fertilize
wilted flowers?
As they grew older,
the land which had grown wheat
washed down the hill,
and the river
carried the land into the sea.
The priest with the horned
mask, who brought meat
from the altar,
turned into a bird
and flew among the mountains.
The people of the markets
who touched their heads to the ground,
changed into clumps of weed
among the gutters
of the bare hill.
A galley which carried wine
The bear sleeps in the cellar hole, where pine needles
heap over the granite doorstep. And the well brims
with acorns and the broken leaves of the oak tree
which has grown where the anvil rusted in the forge.
When my eyes close, I can see another summer:
a bark of rust grows on the trees of the gas pumps,
and the EAT signs gather like leaves in the shallow
cellars of diners, and a wildcat waits for deer
on the roof of a car. Blacktop buckled by frost
starts goldenrod from the highway. Fat honey bees
meander among raspberries, where a quarrel
of vines crawls into the spilled body of a plane.
And the rain came,
no one can remember when.
Here, with us,
in us,
no one knows how long it’s going to stay.
Making our nights starless,
Our days grey.
and us walking fish,
in this soggy space, which is rotting
everything.
An old tree hangs over our dirt driveway so that it brushes our car as we drive past. Last year,
our first year in this country house, I admired its blooming. This year the gardener says it is
leaning because some of its roots have worn away.
wet apple blossoms
on the dark branches
on the dark earth