This song is called  sun of June. Or,
the self-invention of wildflowers.

Or, the sweetened fragrance of the outdoors
before the damp scent of dusk descends.

With the painted gold flitting through the woods
and wild lilies in all the right spots

silver blades of marsh grass stand up tall
"I will never desert you."

Desertion inevitably wears earthtones, like a thin smile,
this recollected song.

Late summer a lofty pause. At work I am absent from myself; from any conviction. The vegetation has reached to its fullest and covers the vision. Memory free of concern. As in the work of nighttime to morning, so memory of other seasons is dimmed. We wish to retreat at length and recline to watch the season's sunset. Not yet the descent into the urgent. A moment sent to you so silent, it is punctuated with the song of cicadas, chyrp of crickets, so nourishing for you have only to lift your eyes to see.

What cloud, dim constellation
you pale moon of deep detachment from the self.

Dark moon undersea, you are unwilling to perform me
So come! It clings untold time before leaving; reduces the fat of life.

Though your gravity blots out possibility, there’s use hanging aloof
an opaque cloud, tempering all things loud, bright, and obtuse--

Now you are sealed with all time, you want kindly to observe
Stillness.

And when all time departs in a vapour,
you cling without occupation,

an array of senses, then often you begin:
sketching and sketching, and sketching.

Moon

Moon-- roughly
the size of a cantaloupe.

Whom eyes have chafed on,
not perceiving any pain.

Moon, but not quite Li Po's:
Many hungry are below you

hung, paused as if thinking
on the paths to your glaciers.

After “lo fatal”

When I read you first I was living in Bergen.
Pretending at translation
and going up scree, clutching at conifers
in a painted flaxen sun.

I'd imagined you’d given up on being Modernista
to settle for a quaint shack—
for the hardness of the carved fjord.

Now if you were to arrive in the wild
where I have kept this place
strangely similar by the pine, blue herons,
               Mount Ozzard over the dandelions,

how would you come walking down the road?

Would deer pause to smell your tracks
or the cedar cutter look up as he heard you pass,

or these coal-black snags
which guard the lot’s entrance
          and haven't swayed in so long
groan?

Dichoso el árbol, que es apenas sensitivo.
Happy is the tree, you said. Scarcely sentient.

Ruben Dario: what is the tree
which rushes through this poem?

Moon hour

Waking up,
the streets are with so empty
it's hard to believe night
could hold the moon so delicately
in its hand, detached,
like a mirror.

The mirror while we sleep
gathers the mountains up
and waters the thirsty dreams
of thistles
blowing in the moon breeze
the moon aloft
yolked to night forever,
neither dejected nor happy
it wanders its light through
its milk on the ground.


Sleepwalk**

Your mother in a sleepwalk began searching in the leftovers
of what lay in her mind for the three things she had misplaced.

A ring of keys or a wooden bowl, an appointment not written down,
a door not closed.

There she is descending the stairs, opening drawers and pulling
back curtains until her father wakes her, asking

"What is it your looking for?" And leads her back to her room,
where the future resumes and she is telling this story to a child.

I'm with you in the old red mortar and brick,
the city our childhood played out in.

No one can touch
or bear the humility of the quiet things here.

That which was silenced decades ago
shred itself.

Downtown, you find self is not a container or apparatus
but a sunlight.  

And sometimes also a shadow. A crowd. Watch
how they fold down the granite stairs. Ripple in the wind.

They both unwind like a line from the fish reel
and stand still as a streetlight,

a name not spoken.