My father is buried where crows can watch over
they rattle and grate to the sky. They stand
triangular in the sharp pinyon pines:
they don’t know how long they’ll stay. I want
to speak how the crows do, clear as
uncoiled rain, forged bright as ten-penny
nails, agile to cut through any distance.
My father loved their rawness. His spirit
reaches out to me across the trees.
Today a trapezoid-winged crow falls
on the pale aspen by the old steel mill,
at the highway and orange grove crossroad.
My dad threw steel beams into that foundry
for a time. He flashed bright in the kiln.
The sky is sluiced into faded gold,
as the sun strays. Now he is ash,
and crow, and swift feathers tossed to the pines.
I walk in water, the swirling tide
I walk in water, the swirling tide pulls, combs the fingers
of smoke into dires of want. Sky blues into move and sun
note lies, casts the open into a vast net of finds. The deer
travel and leave, skull and bone under full moon rise,
whitened by time. I told you it didn’t have to happen, yet
you showed me what you thought was enough: a deer
on the patio makes itself the only wise thing. How do you
surmise the new direction? The sun dives over thick waves,
weaves through foam. The eyes see grey in the antlers
of morning as the lyre guards the stones, produces lost
thoughts, sutured and gone, like rocks too far out to sea.
Instructions for cloudy wing
I dream about walking the ridges, the pinking finches right near the top.
Clouds sweep blossoms to wind cliffs. I remember you talking of
switchbacks on the grapevine, bowing across mute shale like a phantom
in a lost world, an imaginative scarring moment of change and regret.
Speaking of regret I like how it rhymes with egret, a waterbird who
lives in the line between final and sky, the wings freed at right angles.
As I go up, I feel the beak of it pressing the air back further and then
I have the flight, the lift, to hit the ridge, beautiful and bereft
of goldenrod and bluebells, but the seeds still scatter the way the pinned
hawk claims the sky with its own searing, its knuckled fist, it’s
another way to be night. Reading the sky and wings, when the moon
buries the dark below the cairn, I touch edges with wind and sky,
still burning, all I need is to cry the egrets, cloudy wings holding sky.
It’s another thing
I watch for you, who might wander by any minute,
and yet if you don’t, I’ll move on, because that’s what I do.
It’s another thing to know the sky reflects silver
and the little gnats gnaw away at the edges uncounted,
and the steps through the pines go to the next step. Why do
we need to know where the path leads, there was nothing there
before. It is a lot of time to catch a fish and to ferry a child
in a boat across a sound and no one is there to see it, they
say the locusts can even hear undertones in the grass.
Comments