Some hawk-nosed dude in a blue bandana
is laying down his shaggy, reckless legend
for a woman who has surely heard it all before.
She leans back in her chair, and eggs him on
with an easy smile, a word or two, and he is off,
laying down his tale like so much smoking rubber,
and the speed limit does not apply. Even so,
you have to give him credit for the way he floors
the same old stories, makes them sing again,
or maybe something else that he's just recalled
or fishtailed into. That's fine, though, with the blonde
sitting in the chair across the table from him. Notice how she
cradles her cup of tepid coffee and chuckles easily from time to time.

Hear that barking gabble coming across the land.
The people of the air shout Remember,
Remember the closing of the season, and going
somewhere we remembered only in our being,
that we announce in this great song of departure,
this song of approaching cold and the moon's velvet breath.

See how gray gathers on the harvested land and in the south
the moon anchors an archipelago of orange smoke-cloud.

So here they come around again, shouting,
guided in single-hearted delirium,
gliding through the long slow turns that
lead at last to the final letting go. See them
stringing now across the the evening sky,
beating their wild hearts across the smooth, blurred horizon.

For Randall Kruk

Although no stranger to yourself,
you were your own undiscovered country,
always pressing on some border of awareness,
always asking more of who you were.

You were the one who asked of life,
who spoke for spirits and for memory,
who wished us at that last meeting over coffee
to have the time of our lives in Madison.

You demonstrated time and time again
the plain necessity of kindness, of honesty.
That would be your legacy, my friend, your gift -
and in the giving, you became that gift.

After all the words spoken in memoriam,
the Guinness and the soul-soothing jazz,
there came a shifting bow of color in the sky -
rain pouring from a blue cloud at evening.

Back of a barn along these frozen roads,
a month of scrap and splintered wood
falters to ash in irresistible flames
that rage and lick the passing afternoon
into sustaining dark. The lantern moon
lingers just above bare, sweeping trees.

i
In all this white and grey
the world dissolves,
first flakes gone slanting
to the folding river,
gathering at last in grey velvet
streets. Wet snow
laying on the reaching trees,
the waking trees - yellow-haired willow
waiting in a field of white.

ii
Something wild stands alone
in a rift of open water.
Spindle legs, body white as
simplicity, serpent neck and jaws
narrowing to a fine point. How still!
He dreams the snowy land.

The West End wanders in my recollection
like a quiet madman. All the times we were
reminded of the War, pointed out the bullet-riddled
walls of the Old Tate, the Arch, guided through the
rooms where Churchill walked. All that aside,
we looked to keep homesickness in its box with strong
black beer or red, by wandering Regent's Park strewn with
fallen gold, or the Garden's rioting roar of flowers, apples, oranges, potatoes and
all of it turning to the ceaseless industry of men and women.
Mystery was the grey-haired Underground men, grey clothes
stuffed with crumpled paper. Once, I stumbled on a scrap
of unreclaimed, timeless London: shattered glass and rubble
carpeting the dull ceramic tile. Ghosts and dusk entered
where ceiling once had been, the silence of a grainy,
blackandwhite Blitz echoing.

Balanced at the gravel margin
of the road, veiled in grey and blue,
his hands are ****** loose around
the bicycle’s white handlebars
in equipoise below his beard’s
feathered fringe. His threadbare jeans
ride up and down at the knees
with the turning of the pedals,
effortless as air. He shows the world
a look of grave surprise, it seems to me -
presents it to a land that never was his own,
but one that he is only passing through.
Roadside cottonwoods and maples
shield him from the skimming sun,
and overhead a skein of Canadian geese
call and call.

My sister dreams of flying tortoises,
cockatoos and parrots flapping in a
perfect randomness. She watches
from the porch of her cabin on the lake,
strangely grown into a manor, and recalls
the promise of someone soon returning from
a time on the water. The tortoises make her think
of portobello mushroom caps, frayed and black
against the stainless blue. She wonders what this means,
this tumbling opulence, this message in the night that my sister dreams.

i
A still, white curtain balanced in
the perfect blue delights, confounds
the senses, promises a timeless time
when narrow yellow wafers
spin the air around
and diamonds slide down to the pavement,
spatter across the rippling pavement.

ii
The wind’s wisdom teaches me
to take a moment’s rest beneath
an angled awning. Overhead a span
of green and red and blue
banners the northern sky:
a blessing and a memory of blessing.
Soon a second arc,
fainter than the one beneath -
together these hold up the sky,
hold children’s wonder till
they fade to shades of grass and rust.

iii
The bridge trembles under black wheels
and the sliding river flashes gold.
Wreathed in cold white sheets
the pale, piercing sun
illuminates a slide of color
rising in the east
riding the grey leviathan cloud.

You see her on these windy
sun-shot mornings,
walking under yellow trees.
You see her on the sidewalk
in her dull pink jacket,
knit cap the color of burgundy.
Her red-tipped cane swings wide
again and again. She moves with
a bearish shuffle step among
the orange leaves in her path -
listens to the hidden world.
And if you meet her face to face,
though she does this less often
than before, she will ask:
Do I know you? Sure,
I know you from somewhere.

The wheels on either side his chair
blaze morning light. Rusted cars
and trucks rattle along the street.

Mustard yellow buses slow and
stop to let children in. From the patchy
sidewalks women and infants wave.

Evenly he examines all of this, indifferent,
wide awake. It is the spotless way in which he
lifts and sets his cigarette against his mouth

that suggests a lifetime of practice.
A wild, white wreath, a silk dragon
streams around his slick cranium -

smoke in the mouth, in the eyes.

The sky above the treeline hangs
grey and yellow as old linen.
A wild-hearted wind
is from the south,
arriving in waves and troughs,
arriving and turning and rushing past.
Out of sight, a bird trills its presence.
A red-wing blackbird rides the wind's current
up and over and down-gliding into a wide green field.

Long legged woman-girl,
step across the parking lot,
slap cool asphalt with your pink,
rubber sandals. Pay no mind
to the man who studies you from
the sidewalk. He is old enough
to be your father or your uncle.
He is full of morning and sweet
surprise for someone lovely as you.
With his free hand he shakes a smoke
from its pack and blows white wreaths
into the pale day. Keep walking, cool,
long legged woman-girl. Keep watching her
grey-bearded man, caught between admiration and desire's husk.

The car runs rough today, labors over
low hills that lay between me and the city.
Clouds like enormous white feathers
fan across the watery blue. The sun's
warmth has lifted a rime of frost
from the land. The farmer who owns
this field has gone mad it seems,
has taken his tractor on a joy ride
leaving behind a rough arabesque of
dark earth, an unintended and fugitive art.
What moved him to this rash act?
Was it a bitter phone call?
Did he sell the land for enough cash to break even this year?

The animal inside me wears a sweater when it snows.
He lives in Logan's house with his new wife,
and is afraid of the neighbor's electric fence.

The animal inside me eats only cold food from a can
that Logen scrapes into a metal bowl,
and plays with scuffed, rubber toys.

The animal inside me hates the toys and the Alpo,
though he gulps it down and makes a show of play,
ever eager to please.

The animal inside me sings of the Ones who ran wild.
He has a fine collection of bones buried in the back yard,
and revels in rolling in fresh deer ****.

Sometimes, when no one is there to see,
the animal inside me chews the new wife's leather shoes,
although this is mainly a thing of the past.

The animal inside me loves to run, which hardly happens anymore.
He is waiting on the doe-eyed collie who lives down the road,
and wishes that Logan would just burn the stupid sweater.

Laced in bluebird's song,
cicada's needle shrill, the
morning rushes toward noon.
I amble through the neighborhood,
pausing, moving on. It is midway
through the month of August,
Bermuda grass already sprawls
and goes to seed. Dew beads glassy,
cupped on blue-green blades
wide as fingers. And in the
eastern sky, silent silver wings
slide beneath a mare's-tail cloud,
it's knife-edged contrail loosens
soon into a bland and terrifying scrawl.

This morning the air is cool
almost cold, and sunlight falls
warm on the skin. Down the street
the space between maple trees
is thick and pale with light.

You see, it isn’t the body
and it isn’t the spirit.
Or the body in the spirit
or the spirit in the body,
but the panoply of things
caught up in a single breath.