The wheels are only sheep’s milk, not ripening souls.

He sings no lullabye to them. But his arms know the weight.

BENEATH THE SNOW, THE BADGER’S STEADY BREATHING

Beneath the snow,

the badger’s steady breathing.

He does not count the cold as cold.

He does not call his hunger fate.

His sett is neither large nor small. Not dark.

Closer to tree root than human.

Closer to the wilderness

than to its saints

who sought to learn from where they’d moved.

A life uninterrupting,

without want or aspiration.

A persistence.

And yet not meager. Not unfeeling.

—Sharp starlight coming all the way down to the snow.

SKY: AN ASSAY

A hawk flies through it, carrying

a still-twisting snake twice the length of its body.

Radiation, smoke, mosquitoes, the music of Mahler fly through it.

The sky makes room, adjusting its airy shoulders.

Sky doesn’t age or remember,

carries neither grudges nor hope.

Every morning is new as the last one, uncreased

as the not quite imaginable first.

From the fate of thunderstorms, hailstorms, fog,

sky learns no lesson,

leaping through any window as soon as it’s raised.

In speech, furious or tender,

it’s still of passing sky the words are formed.

Whatever sky proposes is out in the open.

Clear even when not,

sky offers no model, no mirror—cloudy or bright—

to the ordinary heart: which is secretive,

rackety, domestic, harboring a wild uninterest in sky’s disinterest.

And so we look right past sky, by it,

through it, to what also is moody and alters—

erosive mountains, eclipsable moons, stars distant but death-bound.

POCKET OF FOG

In the yard next door,

a pocket of fog like a small herd of bison

swallows azaleas, koi pond, the red-and-gold koi.

To be undivided must mean not knowing you are.

The fog grazes here, then there,

all morning browsing the shallows,

leaving no footprint between my fate and the mountain’s.

ARTICULATION: AN ASSAY

A good argument, etymology instructs,

is many-jointed.

By this measure,

the most expressive of beings must be the giraffe.

Yet the speaking tongue is supple,

untroubled by bone.

What would it be

to take up no position,

to lie on this earth at rest, relieved of proof or change?

Scent of thyme or grass

amid the scent of many herbs and grasses.

Grief unresisted as granite darkened by rain.

Continuous praises most glad, placed against nothing.

But thought is hinge and swerve, is winch,

is folding.

“Reflection,”

we call the mountain in the lake,

whose existence resides in neither stone nor water.

TRANSLUCENCE: AN ASSAY

A dog implausibly large,

with fur the color of rose-quartz, slipped through my sleep.

I have never seen roses that color,

or a vein of quartz move through its fissure on soft-padded feet.

This was sure, though: what she wanted was for me to follow.

She did not look back.

A shadow opened then folded behind her.

I followed as if past a gate latch