I.
the warmth of night makes an unusual gallery
a cauldron of leaves spilled on the grid of streets

what stirred once, green in the heart could only be tended
by a woman or a star
atop and apart from all else that came before

no more time is granted for all of yesterday, its ripeness,
its beaming,
to hang more plumply defined than now

where so much distance reddens--is it regret?
converging behind heart's stone
to abode under sleets of snow.


II.
caught briefly in the eye,
these stars and we share intimately
the knowledge that each has expired

is it that a man must take grief in a certain swagger?
or by softness, falling unaffected through the corridor

like a whiteness
or an absence
forgetting

Sometimes the low-lying clouds are a call.
You've never heard it before.
It harrows through you like a train
but lingers even while it gathers itself
while it rushes.

Or a voice, so requiring of you to hear it
one minute it runs recklessly, a little boy,
it has no cares,
casting itself among the trees.
Then, stops all of a sudden
intent on play. You watch
as it takes each green into its hands,

as it turns each leaf over and over
until each is a small black bell.

The incident of a hundred fireflies
like tiny ships
on their way, haphazardly,
to nobody's home
while lightning flickers lightly
in the teeming, inhabitable air.

There will never be a pause now
it is the season of the first song at last
the tremulous heart has found partner
in the world's quivering.

With growth and green fires, birds carry the wind,
shaking out the bronze into a shrillness,
warming and agitating every alcove.

And also from up out of each lost pond
comes the lilted piping of frogs.
There will never be a pause now,

The oldest news has gone through every chamber.
like a road unveiled between mountains,
The sun tightly wraps my seeking to you.

With all the beaming, ingeminate sounds,
with all the shaking green in us,  
there will never be a pause now.

Perhaps it is because they very simply
loved wild poppies,
or the unexpected press of wind.

Learning early of that airless, evacuated space
of love to come
they kept ready the guestroom,
hemmed the waiting into their very clothes.

That there are these persisting towers
yearning crazily despite Babylon,

rising up from the dish of the dead's affirmation
like a stamen from a spring of pollen.

On an uncommonly warm night
swathes of trees stand like armies
camped under the moonlight.

And reflected under the mercurial light
are paths of plum blossoms
opening the dark in drops of white.

Allowed to range freely, one's sight
sways with the trees and leaps,
absorbed into the depth of night.

Below beams a cadre of yellow lights:
from the rooms we have gone into
away from the wide open afterlife.

every advance in visual representation
comes of a life form outside the hand
stored up in the energy of silent work
to see a new radix of the situation.

where does the willingness come from
to forfeit all the lines for the hidden core
where does the fortitude spring
to hold the heavy iron of no one's history?

there is a stump in the yard withered and cracked
at the bark-- more marble than wood.
look how even the sunlight slants off the cut!
never brought to the roots again.

fall against its smooth gray limbs
deep in the burn of memory,

the grain is a book flipped open
to every page at once, the sun.
drink this sweet filtered rainfall
of a hundred years of struggle.