"The poet is of no party." Baudelaire
With winter settling on the place, the sedge
is dry, the woods stand bare. No enemy
to you, I watch the shadow of one hill
rise on the opposite, the valley sheds
its golden skin, grows dull before it drops
in darkness. Sounds sharpen—shards of dry leaves,
wings’ flap, the shake of an abandoned branch.
Outcroppings lose their yellow to the gray,
the swallows drilling holes in the blue air.
More smaller life beats in each metric cube
than in all of my body there is life.
The wind is noise, the wind is movement. Live
branches mingle with the dead. I’m barely
bigger than the ants, slower than spiders.
I don’t move the way these insects scurry.
The beetle has no map of the terrain.
They can’t see all of me at once. Each knows
nothing of what the other thinks. Maybe
they know what water cut these rocks to shape
of heavy brow above blind eyes. I’m not
a stone, nor a bug—that knowledge only
separates me from cicadas sleeping
under my feet. Flies will far outlive me.
The laundry stiffens. Stars, like sheets of white,
sing fearlessly of their own howling.
This perverse season has no fantasy.
Your absence deeper than the gorge, empty
geological truths that come between things.
_from_ From a Winter Notebook
Dark on snow—hawks plate the wind
over a field in winter, empty now that
it’s written, a rhythm has begun in writing.
Sky troubling the toes, singing its songs,
to work with language and not mean. Elegy
are you a monologue, leggy, or conversant
in shadows? Suspect the word enough is not
enough. Come back to me, first encounter.
The curls are slacker or the time runs faster,
flashing coming away from the shingled
roof. There’s the tree, a woody quality
to forest words. The trace of a bird’s beak
on snow, embarrassing the bark. I’m stuck
on a dime, a moment in the stocking on
your leg, snaggled trellis, of peripheral glance.
I look around. I look around and around.
The mouse mounts a retreat. The ashtray
begs to differ from every other. I drop a little
mess of distracted matter. A comma forming
on the cat’s forehead; a comma hangs over us.
We are dying to know ourselves. When’ll the fake
fox enter the real life of underwater foxes.
A sock on the wrong foot. Tomorrow I
can pick up a piece of the pieces, the policeman
on the corner of my cloak of indivisibility.
The fly-shit on the windowpane might gleam
in the rays of divine winter hydrogen.
Communicating tragedy in parking tickets,
the policeman looks around—everything’s winter.