First, set pieces
Clever as zircons,
Then weather,
A sky of cawing birds
And roiling clouds, my
Metaphor or badlands
Deceivingly pink and gold in dawnlight.
It is the angle of sun
Which captivates,
The molten canyon driving west
At sunset. The pearly morning
Centered with a redbird
Uttering his distinctive query
From the low bush beyond the south window.
The rimrocks hovering like
Ogre nursemaids
Massive, flat-topped
While the town below darkens
And sparkles.
A leaf is an anthem
Everything stands for something,
We paddle still waters
Making a silver groove
From which our existence
Like waterbirds perpetually slides forward.
A ring of firs. Black rock.
And always
The dream of white-eyed horses.
When you died, the voices chorused
Like migrating redwings
Filling the bare March trees
With amazing noise, then silence.
I could not open your book,
Examine the photograph or look
At the slanted signature
Of your love. I could not
Feel.
Poetry repulsed me,
Its bleeding scab. Streaking windows
Of rain. Gravel embedded
In mudslick. Why
Write or sing or draw or think,
As Auden said it changes
Nothing.
Last spring the rivers rose
Out of their banks in a hundred-year flood.
A terrified boy was swept away
As the news cameras followed. Men
Lowered ropes, attempting to grasp
An extremity as he boiled past
In the deluge crying out.
This boy, a stranger, breaks
My heart. I wept for him
As I never could for you or myself.
Today, the poem says
I will be spoken the way buds clench
Then burst in the false precursor flower.
The true leaf unfurls its nature
Its delicate ribs, fabric tough
And strange, greenskinned,
Thinskinned, willing to suffer
Loss with the wind. All over earth
Turning to powder, the least of us
Essential and here and now.
