its remembrance of what is.

The Fear of Darkness

The tall marigolds darken.

The baby cries

for better reasons than it knows.

The young wife walks

and walks among the shadows

meshed in the rooms.

And he sits in the doorway,

looking toward the woods,

long after the stars come out.

He feels the slow

sky turn toward him, and wait.

His birthright

is a third-hand Chevrolet,

bought for too much. ‘I

floorboard the son of a bitch,

and let her go.’

The Plan

My old friend, the owner

of a new boat, stops by

to ask me to fish with him,

and I say I will – both of us

knowing that we may never

get around to it, it may be

years before we’re both

idle again on the same day.

But we make a plan, anyhow,

in honor of friendship

and the fine spring weather

and the new boat

and our sudden thought

of the water shining

under the morning fog.

The Broken Ground

The opening out and out,

body yielding body:

the breaking

through which the new

comes, perching

above its shadow

on the piling up

darkened broken old

husks of itself:

and opening to flower

opening to fruit opening

to the sweet marrow

of the seed –

taken

from what was, from

what could have been.

What is left

is what is.

OPENINGS

The Thought of Something Else

1.

A spring wind blowing

the smell of the ground

through the intersections of traffic,

the mind turns, seeks a new

nativity – another place,

simpler, less weighted

by what has already been.

Another place!

it’s enough to grieve me –

that old dream of going,

of becoming a better man

just by getting up and going

to a better place.

2.

The mystery. The old

unaccountable unfolding.

The iron trees in the park

suddenly remember forests.

It becomes possible to think of going.

3.

– a place where thought

can take its shape

as quietly in the mind

as water in a pitcher,

or a man can be

safely without thought

– see the day begin

and lean back,

a simple wakefulness filling

perfectly

the spaces among the leaves.

To My Children, Fearing for Them

Terrors are to come. The earth

is poisoned with narrow lives.

I think of you. What you will

live through, or perish by, eats

at my heart. What have I done? I

need better answers than there are

to the pain of coming to see

what was done in blindness,

loving what I cannot save. Nor,

your eyes turning toward me,

can I wish your lives unmade

though the pain of them is on me.

March Snow

The morning lights

whiteness that has touched the world

perfectly as air.

In the whitened country

under the still fall of the snow

only the river, like a brown earth,

taking all falling darkly

into itself, moves.

The Finches

The ears stung with cold

sun and frost of dawn

in early April, comes

the song of winter finches,