I cannot wait for you.
Ice like mink slips into rivers.
Creeks rear up in horses’ eyes.
The snow is a nomad’s rags.
Winter was an envelope for Spring.
The sun was a stamp on the window circling me.
You are a foreign word on glass
the highway scrawls.
How does
the breeze make you new
under the old sun?
How can your perfect blue words shine
from the eyes of your black sea?
How do you turn your body
into morning
in the entranceway’s night?
And the fields and fields of chrysanthemum
dried in the small vase on the table next to you
that would bend to be scented again?
Nothing is beautiful as it was,
but let’s say you’re a breeze
who can fly
while I, like a dirt farmer, waits
for your smile, for instance,
your smile, the rain of it.
You cannot save me.
I’d wish you try.
To glimpse the torches’ dusty eyes.
To hear the church of their wild dismay
alight the smoky tongues of creek.
Like a braille of us,
which said, at least,
you came near.
You feed the fire many things.
It takes everything.
Stars back away.
Its heart, bodiless,
embodies the asteroid belt
of your outer ruin.
You cannot say what it is.
Like you, it is almost lion-hearted.
It is mostly human.
Brightest of every most broken,
you see what you feel in your eyes,
ferocious engines of a spaceship.
There’s nothing green about the trees
that begin to leaf the skies.
The green is only the whites of blue
it carries, and also, we learn,
the yellow that grasps their ankles.
Of these we name, roots,
because only we can walk for years,
forgetting, even as we grasp for them,
the same way you or I might not recall
what our bodies cannot forget,
how to become a branch
falling from the sky.
We are so much
alike, you misplaced, me
put in mine,
your dress of dirt,
me, a suit
washed in
carnival flies. Maybe
we deserve nothing
other than
each other,
you who
delivered me
here, me
delivering you there,
I say,
putting words in your mouth,
worms rhyming
silly rhyme
wetly
glistening in
our heads.
She wakes from the dream of
sun, eager, blind, devouring true heat,
words to him intent, bristling still,
tiny endings of sight.
His poetry for her, she had said,
would scour down
to carpet trails to rooms,
stairwell to hall, to cool basement
scenting furnace hum,
the twitch of winter glass,
clock in room,
expressionless mouth of
door.
She does not see a man
she stripped down to
a kind of sun, or dark star
crossing dawn into
the borders of her skin.
As we travel in its direction
we are carried for awhile
by stray things
we collect of each other.
This is how I’m reminded
about the togetherness of lost things,
that they resemble each other,
pulling being an expression of reach,
sleep an anchor for darkness
lowered into the sky
at the bottom of a well.
I don’t know if either of us gets there,
the one the Mennonites dug,
but maybe we are simple pail
tugged out from the earth,
each grasp we make
brimming in the other.
This map flows river after river,
creeks popping through them, like bent nails.
I read its mind on Evelyn again,
wind stealing it from your hand,
stuffing it down its pocket of rapids.
I’d go to those rivers once.
It didn’t matter,
you’d never stop finding me.
So, I believed that what the tongues
and grooves of water had to say
was true,
that you loved a wilderness
more than I could ever.
You’d just come to me,
you, your invisible map,
the one
only I could see,
so that nothing, I thought,
would steal it.
This funny place,
every place somewhere else.
How, I love you, turns a face,
changes minds, becomes a back.
Mine, too,
into this river spine of loneliness
up freezing ground,
snow-warmed, underneath.
Isle of Hoy 