My garden is the wild
Sea of the grass. Her garden
Shelters between walls.
The tide could break in;
I should be sorry for this.
There is peace there of a kind,
Though not the deep peace
Of wild places. Her care
For green life has enabled
The weak things to grow.
Despite my first love,
I take sometimes her hand,
Following straight paths
Between flowers, the nostril
Clogged with their thick scent.
The wooden scent of wagons,
the sweat of animals — these places
keep everything — breath of the cotton gin,
black damp floors of the icehouse.
Although a tide turns in the trees
the moon doesn't turn the leaves,
though chimneys smoke and blue concedes
to bluer home-time dark.
Though restless leaves submerge the park
in yellow shallows, ankle-deep,
and through each tree the moon shows, halved
or quartered or complete,
How many miles to the border
where all the sky there is
exists for the soul alone?
Where the only breathers
breathing are constructed
from some new electricity
and the flowers are made
indestructible, and messages
from the dead arrive like calm
white birds with a gift?
One more night of spiritual
ice and we might all become
birds, green birds frozen
on a black winter branch.
There is a drumming in the shadows
under leaves: a million eight-eyed
spiders on the march.
A man with binoculars
fixed a shape in the field
and we stopped and saw
the albino buck browsing
in the oats — white dash
on a page of green,
flick of a blade
cutting paint to canvas.
It dipped its head
A telephone line goes cold;
birds tread it wherever it goes.
A farm back of a great plain
tugs an end of the line.
I call that farm every year,
ringing it, listening, still;
no one is home at the farm,
the line gives only a hum.
Some year I will ring the line
on a night at last the right one,
and with an eye tapered for braille
from the phone on the wall
I will see the tenant who waits —
the last one left at the place;
through the dark my braille eye
will lovingly touch his face.
How long and thin
she seems today
a field of mustard
smiling up at the sun
it draws her eyebrows
together in a little pain
I don’ t think I ever
saw calligraphy of geese
like this overseas
oaks and pines
pretending to be asleep
not quite dark yet
as it is at home
poor people, midnight
All those poems I wrote
About living in the sky
Were wrong. I live on a leaf
Of a fern of frost growing
Up your bedroom window
In forty below.
I live on a needle of a branch
Of a cedar tree, hard-bitten,
Striving in six directions,
Rooted in rock, a cedar
Tree made of other trees,
Not cedar but fir,
Lodgepole, and blue spruce,
Metastasizing like
Bacteria to the fan-
Lip of a draw to draw
Water as soon as it slips
From the snowdrift’ s grip
to come away with Hesiod
and leave the rock as though to rocks
the tree to trees and dwell on other things
imagine the injunction
to leave the mint to its own devices
among the dust & stones in the shadow
of rocks or tree-roots hard as rocks
imagine poems left to their own devices
as poets gorge on air & airy thoughts
& figures – the thought sobers me
to the bone of a sobriety earned
at the expense of the airiness Hesiod
was commissioned to name
Whenever I touch the cairn
marking the summit
of one of my parents,
touch the top stone,
an animal caution comes over me,
sinew and muscle like the brook’ s,
a sudden shivering
green-brown flame.
Soon they will be constellations,
and I a small tower of stones.
