We ate breakfast at an all-night diner,
making small-talk with the waiter.
The yolk of eggs congealed on our plates
like blood around a wound.
Though morning woke as blue as eyes,
my sky was gray. Back home,
I picked among the brawl of trash,
whisker of breeze at my back,
hoping to find you in last year’s jumble.
Nothing in the shed but rusted
nails and wire, bent shovels and worn
rakes, toothless and scattered.
You are not there,
not anywhere near breathing.
Your dogs slink by like shadows,
sniffing air.
How to live when one loses every precious thing:
my father, gone last year,
and my childhood, limping with him
down that long alley of the past?
He was a cornucopia,
a horn of plenty;
I am left with a handful of regret,
breast wet with tears.
I dream, and I am young.
He is younger, too.
We sleep in the same house.
Drink the same water, eat familiar food.
Memory is marginalia
in the book of evening,
thin trace of light,
spider-writing on the edge of the world.
His shadow follows me around—
not quite a ghost — a feeling:
an absence, a missing limb,
the phantom pain
Oracle is another word for moonlight through the trees.
His moon. Our moon.
For years, he held it for me in his hands,
blew it out in a final breath.
Darkness is a thick, black thing.
Dreams filter through uneven slats of sleep.
In and out. Light and shade.
He says, “I am a stone.”
He says, “I live in a meadow of grass and stars.”
Earth is but a scruple of sand.
Heartbreak of longing, your truth is a lament.
Late night in winter,
winds low like cattle in the fields.
Coyotes moan.
And ice is a silver sliver.
Beam over beam,
I fall through the center of the well,
tumble through silent night,
crash through his reflection on frozen water.
He is gone, plunged among galaxies,
oceans of night.
I’ve seen the pictures—
cream ellipses, streaks of light.
He, who thought the moon an avatar,
swims in streams of infinite matter,
tracked by a telescope star to star.
But I find him in things close by:
shining eyes of a newborn calf,
lustrous Milky Way of its mother.
Heaven of wild iris along the creek,
mottled poplars climbing the sky.
Constellations of frost on a windowpane,
his roan, a comet across the field.
In the garden, big-faced sunflowers,
burning against the green.
There's snow, of course.
We don't wonder at the hard-packed lack
of color. And those shacks on frozen
lakes. An elaborate village built on cold.
The season is right for catching fish through ice
in murky water. But we pass.
Hope no longer serves a purpose.
Zambonis swish by. At night,
the moon unblinks its eye,
and we see clear to the treeless tundra.
Moose stand, black gantries beside the road.
The world an unending plain. No one sighs,
or weeps or wishes upon a star.
No one is born.
Again rain. My window is streaked
with the leavings.
I watch the young — oblivious,
jaunty with pregnant backpacks
and cigarettes —
chatting among themselves, puffing.
This October, one hopes for little:
that the roof tiles remain intact
against the weather,
that the radiators emit
their click beetle warmth,
that the grizzled mist abate
to reveal deer feeding
along the late abandoned paths.
The horse stands unmoved in paddock mud,
one hind leg cocked in coquettish hesitation.
Air shifts its weight today, and the sky clouds over —
bitter in its occlusion. Alone in my room,
I think cup and bowl, tired and sleeping.
Words form: Shenandoah, Manassas, Alabama.
I remember weeping, graffiti and fear.
Imagine if nothing had a name, sound had no meaning.
No sign for laurel, no voice for dispensation or despair.
In Heaven, it is always autumn.
John Donne
Dear to us ever the changes of raiment:
leaves breaking, pod to penury.
But if it were always autumn,
we'd sit by the lake with no fear
of its freezing over. Nearby squirrels,
their perch unthreatened, their food secure.
And plentiful the bees, impenitent
and princely in their golden drone.
The sky we'd breathe would hold us
in its grip — cool, relentless, blue.
Harvest sheaves, we'd brim with birds.
I am a vigil outside your window,
a bucket beside the well.
The sun will not set, Darling,
until you undress in summer’s dusk.
I see you in faded light,
tawny as a field of wheat,
shy as a ruffed grouse stalked
by the eager hunter.
Shadows move noiseless about the room.
A silhouette poses against the wall.
You undo the day—
button by button, piece by piece.
The last tired hours slip off like shoes,
and darkness marries the night.
A dove sits on a limb, poised for winter.
She flies. The twig jiggles, recalling her.
No one left to curry the scalawag horse.
No one left to bury seeds in the pocket garden.
The window is sky; then sky becomes night.
When the tune stops, the air stands alone.
Morning. The pods are at half-mast,
excess of wetness,
slight physics of rain.
The fox—no fox, but a timorous cat—
gleams like an orange persimmon
from under the dank and ruffled brush.
The quaking ponds steam like geysers.
Small passerine birds flutter
their qui vive alarm.
Back home, no one is waiting.
Sadly, I follow a will-o’-the-wisp,
discovering within this most dismal bog
May apple, rosemary, and oleander.
I’ve searched the pasture and pines,
roamed the orchard’s back forty,
looked among branches bent low,
but saw only apples pecked open by crows.
Is it hiding in corn rows and tassels?
Is it where the wind tickles the oaks?
At dawn, the farm was an egg I forgot to gather.
Our rooster stayed mute in his coop.
Now cattle sleep on their feet by Rum Creek.
Catalpas drop worms by the water.
In the yard, the old dog lies panting and dreaming
while night skies brood.
I sit alone in the kitchen,
waiting for you like an empty grate.