You hear the roadhouse before you see it,
Its four-beat country tunes
Amplified like surf through the woods,
Silencing bullfrog and red-tailed hawk,
Setting beards of moss dancing
On dim, indeterminate trees
That border two-lane blacktop.
Docked tonight, you reveal the badge
Of the farmer, that blanched expanse of skin
Where cap shades face, babyhood
and hue
to have unheld a scale —
silver dishes little mirrors on their chains —
they go that way, This
and hoist
It’s not like looking into a pool,
to let your intelligence run away with you
Come back quarter size, apricot moon
A changeling is a child who
appeared under cover
of the ordinary, in exchange
I wear my heart on my sleeve,
or rather both sleeves, since
it's usually broken.
Sometimes when I join my hands
to pray, the jagged edges
briefly touch,
like a plate that fell and cracked
apart from being asked
to hold too much.
To strip away this incessant chatter,
yes, but what lies underneath it?
Death, of course, or our fear of death.
Which is why we talk so much,
bury our heads in books, turn forests
into pages and pages into mirrors
in which we see ourselves appear
and disappear. When I look up
from the story I've been reading
about the Jews in Nazi Germany
and the silence that closed their
mouths forever, I see a girl outside
the cafe smiling in at her father
who smiles back but cannot hear her.
