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.