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Strict land, stricter yet the wind shearing trees, patina
that is November, dank clods stunned by ice. Where the
light is no shadow goes and where wind, animals hunch and
shimmer and are a storm’s augury. Sing nones, sing vespers,
send every message through fire like mares reined toward
slaughter. I remember no birds, manes of cloud dissipating
above an orchard where migrants flailed on ladders. Wind
hawed their singing, and come frost they too were gone.
Fence wire snapped and barbs tore flesh of herds driven to
the valley. My flesh was that flesh, as rivers divulged
heat, turned solid. As I lease my body to crisp air, bright
barns, the disheveled conspiracy of flocks now fleeing.
Sing nones, sing vespers for what night does when fire
fades. Ephphetha, be opened—
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Ducks in a daze with mourning doves—
Sweetness of hay fresh mown, the clouds
Slowly stacking, the constant
Revectoring of flocks among weeds,
A dampness to northern aspects of field
Slanting toward the river, workmen
Silent, workwomen finding shade, what remains
Of harvest not mattering as one thing bears down
Upon the other—wind in ornamental trees,
The waxy mane of the whitest mare, whitest
From oncoming weather-light—
The foal not shying from the hand that gelded it.
Near the Heart of Happening
The foal hangs half-way out
and the mare strains
but can’t push anymore.
I bring a bucket of cold river-water
across the field. Haboo,
I say in her ear. Haboo,
what the Skagit children said
when the storyteller stopped:
keep the story going.
They said it with clambor,
with hands and voices
louder each time
but I am soft with it.
Haboo and cool water
rubbed on her neck.
Haboo I say reaching in
where the hips have locked
as she groans and falters.
Haboo for the shanks I grab
and jerk. For the spine
popping and the hips coming free.
Haboo for the foal lying in the dirt
as the mare nudges
and cleans its body
as the breathing stops.
Haboo as the body cools
as we stay with it after
as light begins
as I regard the still air
and the meadowlark, the weight
of its bright singing.
In the Ghost-House Acquainted
I close the simple flowers
and bid the moon now rise
for Death is not my harbor.
And I walk among derelict combines
that they might know
and come unafraid.
In mulberry small birds sleep.
Hornets enter one by one the districts
of their hidden city.
A fence dissolves. Reappears.
Great oak lean into the darkness.
They lean into the light
of the world now upon us.
And I sing to llamas
bedded in a ditch
that the chorus preserve them
as frost presses down
with equal weight and tenor.
That shadows breathe of their own
existence. That this heart
not fail. And these hands.
And those hands. That the moon move
and the earth move
as it was in the beginning.
As I remember the alfalfa
and stacks of hewn wood—
as I remember that world
melting into this.
