Crow flies across the sky as if it is addicted
to the grand gesture.
The crickets keep going secular. Every mailbox
chromes hope a little brighter, a little
more honest in the manner of witness
broadcasting permission back
into the lyrical fence row
it once was. The snow
is smarter than the light. All the darkness
crunched up now in the crow-crucible.
Doctrine of low sheep across a hillside, like someone smashed
a piano. The sparrow-haloed man, standing in the night’s tar.
He says: Here is ache coming out to preen.
He says Hello my sweet
little threshing floor
• • •
Frost-witched and teeming. Hummingbird with a pill
for a heart. Shale light as corrective
against mood’s low fidelity to the overall
project of morning.
One worries a puddle’s desire
to harbor.
Squirrel’s tail dusts the sky for prints.
We take lack out to the west pasture
to fatten.
• • •
The afternoon was a lecture
without words, like what a goat does to a bale of hay.
• • •
Morning says wager everything, which is
the same as tell me the old story
Water in the ditch like it just got off third shift.
Lullaby of the palm of your hand, of the unyielding beauty
of plot. Always the fog riddles us:
Who am I?
What’s a metaphor? What’s a meadow for?
• • •
Let me be a small country, full of a meadow’s law. Let me be
the house with a roof in the shape of our hands.
Let me be a table’s grace. Let me be the sound of the engines
beyond the trees,
so that it is possible to believe that the trees
have been turned on.
Let me be a man mistaking his fire
for the first fire. Let me be the wind
catcalling. Let me be the sound from her mouth
in the shape of a gate. Let me be
a village covered in goats and orange trees.
Let me be the sun copying itself
all over our arms. Let me be the afternoon
that becomes a piece of tape across
our mouth. Let me be the line in the fraction,
humiliating everything in half.
Dear never neutral, dear always witness, dear bird
named Edge of Town:
Let me be the woman with the bag shaped
like the bottom of a boat.
Let me be the past tense acting heroically.
When we click on the about button
for spring, we are both on the masthead.