Except when once we drew identical lots
nothing’ s ever come between us.
We keep our drifts of space
spare and daily shake our down.
You’ ve glanced beyond your dirty cuffs
and caught me hand-washing my clean shirts.
Stuck with sharp wind, both
bloods are rare and rarely do
we taste the walnut’ s knot of oil.
We wake between our fitted sheets
and shake our fists or pretend real fright
but not in this do we dare touch.
There are rooftops
made of cloud remnants
gathered by a trader
dabbling in car parts and burlap
At night, I dive onto the breeze
fermenting above the dirt
and dream that I am a crocodile
a tin of shoe polish, an audience of two
In the morning, before the smallest yawn
becomes a noodle, I am offered
a ribbon of yellow smoke
I opt for fuzzy rocks and clawed water
and, of course, the perishable window
I am one of the last computer
chain errors to be illuminated
I tell you there are rooftops
All the old photographs, hidden like buried
Treasure. Broken prayer sticks under my dreams
And my worn mattress. Each one like a postcard sent back
Home; wonders only seen in slick travel magazines.
Boxed up under my bed, colored souls on Kodak paper —
I can still see Grandma’ s smile next to her resting sheep dog.
Like a blue lightning strike over the northern sky,
Over two black houses, I pull the first leaf out, at random.
Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.
Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.
And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.
On the warm Sunday afternoons
And every evening in the Spring and Summer
When the night hurries the late home-corner
And the air grows softer, and scraps of tunes
Float from the open windows and jar
Against the voices of children and the hum of a car;
When the city noises commingle and melt
With a restless something half-seen, half-felt
I see them always there,
Upon the low, smooth wall before the church;
That row of little girls who sit and stare
Like sparrows on a granite perch.
A SIGHT in camp in the day-break grey and dim,
As from my tent I emerge so early, sleepless,
As slow I walk in the cool fresh air, the path near by the hospital
tent,
Three forms I see on stretchers lying, brought out there, untended
lying,
Over each the blanket spread, ample brownish woollen blanket,
Grey and heavy blanket, folding, covering all.
A slumber did my spirit seal;
I had no human fears:
She seemed a thing that could not feel
The touch of earthly years.
No motion has she now, no force;
She neither hears nor sees;
Rolled round in earth's diurnal course,
With rocks, and stones, and trees.
That which installs itself in the mind embraces sound
Rebounding,
rounding the fecund earth
Birth, as in what is not, as in one makes one,
is a mighty absence to understand
(and there are those who fail to get their lessons done)
Dun is the color of submission
Unfledged, she leafs through what has been nothing never
Never to be what she is/ or could /or hope to be
Bewitched by dictions (fictions) on the surface —
Face naming that which she must save, polished like an apple —
I walk into the bakery next door
To my apartment. They are about
To pull some sort of toast with cheese
From the oven. When I ask:
What’ s that smell? I am being
A poet, I am asking
The fire was so fierce,
So red, so gray, so yellow
That, along with the land,
It burned part of the sky
Which stayed black in that corner
For years,
As if it were night there
Even in the daytime,
A piece of the sky burnt
And which then
Could not be counted on
Even by the birds.
