Breakfast

love like rain   falls

the wet collar

of her

white shirt collapses

against her neck

supports

the soaked nest

of her hair that

cradles

the streaked egg

of her face.

if ever

if ever

something

like air

in truth

fills me

ever

and ever

again

what sorrows

thereafter.

Like Grapes

the pears         thankfully

are small this year.

the tree           thoughtless

sways in abundance.

Cusp

from the edge

of the bowl

the sound

of a bell

song of brass

in ornament

of crystal

softly struck.

Thanksgiving

you waved

your arm

nothing

to say

ashes

on snow.

Infidelities

one fed the

hole inside

another

invigorated

and she was

you in so

many ways.

a year as rainfalls

a year as rainfalls

in bone memory

tree rings

archives in dense materials

eggshells know

           

                                    (concrete

                        too disembodied)

hardness in layers

                        drops

                                    encoded

                                    atoms

I dream across cross-

                        sections.

there is love

there is love

                        here

and the will

to love like

the will

to build furniture

that stirs

when I am alone

too long.

the wind will soon be bound by the thickets

the wind will soon be bound by the thickets

that will whistle piercing incantations

none of us can decipher

                                    children hang wires

from low pin oak and locust limbs

                                                the children

are the first to consider this strategy:

monitor to manipulate

their measures continue

the songs of children form mathematical spools

of ribbon to remind us what we have forgotten

how concise a clear mind

a room without clutter

or rotted floorboards in piss-stained corners

a seamless mind with raw sunlight

on everything that passes through

everything weighed

tagged

catalogued

against its resonance

ghosts shuttled through the appropriate

throbbing conduits

ghosts, inconclusive data billowing

the gauzy web of a child’s taxonomy

as if sailcloth.

Interrogations

the wind howls looking

for its heartbeat          I admit

that I tend to ignore the wind

so he catches me often

calling out to   inviting

the others the lesser gods

he catches me feeding them

and is witness when they

inhabit me

            I have no excuse

for my direction or in-

discretion        I try to love

is all

                                    and you,

wind, do you love as you savor

the dance in everything

do you

as you pass through the world

as through a net

                        as you pull

at my clothes to get at my chest.

where is the grief in the harvest

where is the grief in the harvest after the land

has been sheared and after the vigils for rain

have ended                              now we must

tend to each other in ways we cannot tend

to ourselves                             I ask you to help

me push these walls outward and to hold

that line as I cut with sheer will the rusted

armatures lingering in my forsaken fields

such wreckages erected and half-erected

                        abandoned for other promises

and now the clean-up you’ve been brought to

for twenty years now like a secret cabin in a

secret wood with faded curtains and dishes

that remind us of childhood summers at an

aunt’s or grandparent’s house             full

of anachronisms and inherited meanings

inhabited with small suitcases where I hid

my humiliations and my shame at not being

like anyone else                       sometimes

I dream of this cabin with my ghosts politely

knocking on the door   asking through the windows

if it is time yet growing impatient insistent

and I wonder now that the harvest is over

and the light is dropping down in its golden bow

when will you invite me to your cabin to meet your

ghosts and to help unpack the suitcases         when

I ask as if through a window.

Tryptich

at night the dead make crowns with their bones

to mimic the living who with feathers

mirror the gods.

as they roam the dead carry collections of our teeth

like a pocketful of tombstones

or a riverbed.

the vision of the dead like autumn wind is blind

hands of the wind comb the dry fields

for the love the dead leave behind.

At the End, At the Beginning

            The crows are still asleep, though morning has made her introductions and apologies.  Leaves, bound only by frost, float off at the warm touch of her arrival.  At the edge of the field the corn shakes off the night breath, while the river lingers over her song of the ones who roam and thread the sinewy moonlight of this ancestral valley.  For a moment, nothing moves;  then the oily air spatters with cartwheeling crows while on wires and treetops other crows start shouting punchlines to jokes they can’t ever remember.

need to walk

need to walk

out beyond

the usual

            markers

where sadness

like tinsel

cartwheels

over snow

where the wolves

devour

the tarred shell

of your heart

out there

face-up

bleeding

in the snow

another heart

            stirring

in the wound

in the healing

            womb.