Up and down are not for all things what they are for the whole cosmos*
- Aristotle

There are clouds that pass overhead in sleeves of a darkening brocade.
Have you forgotten they are without weight to us or belonging?

If you are looking for an image to possess, you are one of us.
Not to desire, but to drift

above in the arms of those helpless dancers--
that is imagination.

The god of altitude stands outside
of when or where, enamoured by a lifted chin.

Push up with a force equal to your own displacement
and you may become. Push down at your ends

and you sink at once into this day,
it is a pearl at the centre of the earth.

If you are looking for an image to possess  or to
be possessed, you are one of us.

Her shrill call comes carrying more
than this hour we keep.

And we desire a feather
to arrange for each hour,
as those before

but receive only hunger:
carnivore's memory,
an unfillable bucket.

Not to awaken us entirely
we fall into soft beds,
feathers.

See the fact of tomorrow and
tomorrow provided

like the floating "here"
in another's eye, this meal,

the uninterrupted dive.
We do not remember it.

canoe
by the oyster bay
in a mountain blue

let the hand through
the gray,
canoe

where a seal or two
blinks and strays
in a mountain blue,

swirling water into new
wine-coloured shades.
canoe,

stretch the light you
saw had stayed
in a mountain blue.

what is this body you drew
like a bolt from the clay?
canoe
in a mountain blue.

The net is finer than the spider or silkworm's.
Curling, it catches and flares here and there,
grazing down the ribcage of this world
and occupying all spaces, tenderly.

It has come from the farthest places
where a star has passed into senescence
and no light remains.

In August the silver maples
flip and wave backsides of their leaves,
chiming and tinkling under its protection.

So much air and light
has looped through the beaks of birds
and pulled them down from flight.

Departure is what the speaker inhabits.
A self turning photograph
pulling away during the taking.
But slightly over-saturated,
full of the green turned gold.

The earth will become bald white again,
faultless and raked by the winds.
For now, the net slackens out
over the borders of woods
and resting in treetops, safe to be viewed.

A hawk drifting,
turns over the topography of the day's catch
in his eye.

Shadows close like open waters.
But the low and unending dilation of cricket song
of this month plays well beyond dusk.

Hear it extending into you
like delicate limbs
to enter the ear.

Your skin is not a history of seeing
but of being seeing.

So heavy it has grown around the questions
which live in this postulate world as birds.

Inconstant and full of chatter
One season they built a nest in you
near the sea,

diving and disappearing
as the plover does through a wave
to return upon freshly turned earth
a robin.

O lidded One,
what is this heat which would bear sit  
with plain silence on kitchen tables.

Lady: what there is to say should have already
chosen a way between us. Pick your words?
They are the flowers the earth holds ripened upon
gentle palms. Know this and make your bouquet.

Given a moonless sky
there was once a time
we could hold words in the mind
far as the line of horizon.

The problem with pragmatism
(aside from self-loathing)
is that no one sings of it.

Of spring: it is not that the flowers crouch on
with an aperture already dialled to metabolize
a portion of the sun, and die,--
it is not that all of this unfolds as scripture.

We live in a web of connections.
For Hume, the sun might not rise.
The flowers will come.