poetry

At night you are an olive tree
the possibility of branches

stretching to sun. I reach around
warmth as if it were outside me, you might be cork

or cotton where you grow. What is desired
by this language of limbs

that we be a stillness of heat, dark
until only our seeing.

And the eye’s concealment becomes our lover
and by the silence we formed with our voices we hear

Mist in the morning. Over days
the sun strikes ice.

Teeth creep down windows.
The vines begin to leak in

one drop at one time. The sound,
the touch of ice, the touching of ice.

Someone has been walking a distant to and fro
scraping shovel against snow.

A hawk is dark over winter ground.
A man shatters through the overgrowth.

Between watchers, the trees of limbs bend.

When wasn’t rain, if I am not fooled
when was? So the rain cannot be seen

nor does it rain outside me, nor does it rain
inside me, if there is raining seen. It is thus

but no it rains, no thus for an it to be. Steady
in darkness soundless sound of rain wet

that is to hear without hearing heard
or simply speaking now as rain becoming

Somewhere you are out walking in that
careful loneness
as water beneath the many necks of trees,
a lamp enshrouded.

No communion exists between us
or anything. It is around this
that fear has wrapped
its teaching. I know you are listening

itself, the owl in the woody night, that sudden
when address is sincerity
and it does not matter how we say you or I.

I am the kiss,
what is done without being done
and only.

At night I dream as us about the dust.
The people who emerge from it
heat rippling across the surface of a lake
pass out of and into the whiteness, everywhere.
The white dust that takes the moisture from our skin
and in the fog-like wind roves as clouds
wandering the landscape
the bristles of many silent brooms.
We wait its passing through us, we are not
swept away. Nothing comes as no surprise:
the ships that flame out, sailing across the surface
of this lake of dust, slowly turning wheels
disappearing in the thumping of the night.
Nowhere feels freer than this. Even the smoke
smiles around its own coiling away.
If you move out a ways, if you look
from a distance, the earth seems to rain toward the sky
encasing the transient substance of the world
before burning.

You know in what you are is gentle
in the unsleeping hours before light.
I am that same moving, the walnut tree

the rust. Morning is an empty lattice.
The lilac rustles in dark kindness
as the edges of the air turn to water.

When we lie together in this silence
I can't remember what we call ourselves.
If we are wakeful, as if by asking
in the calls of birds, we hear nothing

forming in the cathedral of their sound.
We have no need of questions, but I wake
to find that I was but the tongue
that tried to taste itself...

That red lady bug
on a tomato vine
maybe where the trellis twine
will brown;
not that that Chinese Cabbage bolted
too soon
into un-serious moments
of tiny yellow
tweezering, though it did
for eating;
and some mole burrows,
the few hoppy flea beetles
left, some lopped leaves-
potato,
a sunny morning makes it
all percolating
in that, which
as laughing does, so too
am I

1

The mud's fingers,
small worms
multiplying in the white
soapy cream
of thistle seed
along the garden beds
where yesterday
I planted lettuce seeds:
Red Oak, Red Romaine,
Golden Bunch.

2

I could sit here
and pick
ripe strawberries,
just,
the first,
humming a note
as sweet
and tart
and sudden
as the accidental kiss
you share with a lover
one afternoon
and know
that everything
is right.

3

Slugs are kind of disgusting
and destructive
but when one
prodigious specimen
pokes its Martian antennae
around the corner of the old barn
after the rain
in the most timid unhurriedness
imaginable, I can't help
but love it too.

a tightening, a closing up, my throat constricts
not so that i cannot breathe, but i cannot sing
and what then, i ask you, what then can i share?
how then can i, when i have yet to learn to dance?
i would say i am working on my dance moves,
but there is only so much practicing i can do
before i get tired or hungry or anxious.
there is this desire, i want to say i am this desire
but it is still unsettling to find myself so transient,
turning from one body to another, arousing
this image and that, this momentary feeling bleeding
into the next, but only the condition; unsettling,
yet i have also been waiting a long time to find myself
so libidinous. i've been wondering where it is,
and now there is this tightening in my throat
when thoughts stray too far from my attention;
then i wonder: what is it? the first time i felt this
constriction, i took it for an allergic reaction, and

one hawk

has flown down.

it is cold,

sometimes snow does

not anticipate

wind

though what is not thought

does not wait

in the red hollow

of the bud,

in the squeaking

in the boughs

of the almost

unheard trees