The rain-modulated trees and the hoarse leaf
That in themselves tell a love so complete,
Were once the playthings of lovers’ sights
Who passed here once and once and never.
Love the destitution of love.

The mouth is the small compass of the soul,
Without dials, true north, or magnetic force,
The ungaugeable instrument of the voice,
In directionless modulations of undertow,
To circumnavigate under cartographer’s pole
Stars guide our wayfinding-heirlooms of words.

The clouds loosened from the sun
Like a frock from a tidywoman,
Past care with her labors done,
Crumpled rag thrown over a chair,
While a fan blows the loose ends
Of the apron ties like misty fragments,
The clouds loosened from the sun.

To spend the hours compiling skies, indexing unearthly strata,
Mark the dog-eared page of moments with the hesitant thumb,
Waiting to turn each day and find death a bouquet of words,
All to view glowing creases under the closed eyelids of time.

The only love I have known is the bird that lives in my ear,
In the wind and cloud tunnel of long ago, with a hot salve
Of sunshine poured into the singing hole, the warm honey
Of wives’ tales, the remedy of home against the world,
Though the song has since flown.

Nothing can be said from the lip of the sun,
To array with full redress the wind-flayed waters
Of the river-run and the naked broomrape of Spring,
Absolve naiads of their blued minstrelsy in venous scream,
Or pour a yellow songbird from the gold-rimmed cup of war.
Nothing is said in the liver-spotted ground of rain-ghosted gardens,
Where love’s monument is a blot of dried flowers and grayed thorns.

What is Christmas but the collected dead to say one last goodbye,
To speak in their fabulous, untranslatable tongues of old furniture
And the lacquered shine from the lighted tree and pablum of candles,
All that seems childhood’s undersong of pine and catch-full solitude of eyes.
Until the feeling past Christmas of unwrapped sunset and having said goodbye.