first snow

10/28/11

somewhere in michigan, mid-day, just off the interstate
berries the birds have left deepen in their october blue
as sleet dry-whispers into the last hanging birch leaves --

trucks roar past, all hurry and wind
i want to turn and tell you that i loiter here
halfway on the long road
leaning back
the flat miles in chains between us

yesterday a river lifted the year’s first few snowflakes
i breathed the cold from your hair
you opened your eyes over my shoulder
and gasped when a raven landed soundlessly in the top of a pine

we saw the raven fly again
but now I stop here to delay further distance
to touch the berries and ask you
as if you might hear -- knowing you will hear --
is the raven still there?
does the green branch sway in this wind?
tell me and i will believe --
is the snow still falling?

i drift among the forked trunks of the birches
wishing for your small pale shoulders in my hands

evening

gull

gull

in this field of ragweed
where the name ragweed
unfolds in our breath like a childhood

we are lost together
you become the hour when i am born

.

oblique

an infinite distance

Rise

It comes unsought -- only unsought.

It comes uninvited -- only uninvited --
and by preference at the core of sorrow,
when sorrow without relief

slumps into the mind like thick,
obvious mud: the sick child,
the fallen marriage, the failing

god who hides the fragments of his face
in debris, weeks when you learn
sorrow is the only possibility.

It comes like this. One evening
you trudge along, broken,
a street chosen because choice

doesn’t matter, watching your numb
shoes, and for no reason at all
the late-spring light lifts itself

up from the late-spring lawns,
and the two sullen teens,
glaring as you pass, shyly

take each others’ hands,
and the fading sun
has just enough day left

to burn the stained glass
of a stone church
free of its gray blur,

so that gold and blue flash
and yearn, and the sky above
trembles now, ready -- ready

to fly open at just the right whisper.


.