Time/Place/Change
1.
Day like a day in summer
night like a summer night--
still as the shallow river
a road emptied of travelers.
August and your body
is weighed down with living
through what it has--
sometimes it feels fractured
as granite talus you climbed over
to reach some named summit.
Light knows the season--
it pours itself over
the mind's worry and work
over the sides of the forested hills
over the harvested fields
to a fence where yellow sunflowers wait.
2.
Didn't the snow just become rain
weren't the new calves just born
and the spindly-legged colts
didn't my ankle just heal
after that icy run
didn't we just clear dead stalks
from the garden and dig
around new green shoots
weren't we just watching
the first swallows stitch across
the early evening sky
didn't the red poppies just open?
I remember how my summer body felt
in the heat of a rock-walled canyon
and how the river water cooled it--
I remember I kneeled in the river.
I don't know what time is anymore
but the sun does and the trees on the hillside
answer by turning their leaves to gold
before they die and fall.
3.
Above the roofs of houses
fire has become the brilliance
of the night--its red flames
scarring the faces of the mountains
and consuming the leaves of the great pines
their branches now black silhouettes
against the dim sky of morning--
the smallest animals who run from it
charred skeletons.
This scorched earth is not hospitable
and we wonder if we will live
to see it healed.
When the fires at last die out
will we see the moon rise
over the ghosts of the trees
and will we be comforted?
4.
The light of autumn
is slant and spare--
I used to be so sure
this season was temporary--
now I feel it is more weighted.
On cold nights the garden
dries and hardens, by day
the brown stalks of hollyhocks
are bending down.
Oh heart, beat bright
a little longer--
hold me to a passion.
5.
It's sad to think there might not be
enough happiness in the world
for everyone--
where wars are raging
does anyone look
at sun shimmer on the river's surface
or into the face of a flower?
In those places the moon
turns a blank eye
where hearts are closed up like houses
of people who flee to no safe place--
do my words matter to them?
do they even recall their beautiful names?
6.
The earth said
Come to me--
or because it was so dazzling
I thought it was speaking to me.
Whitehouse Mountain of course
was silent as rocks are
but it held me for a while
in its steely shadow.
So I lay down in the tall grass
and called out the names
of all the trees and flowers
I could see--
oak juniper pine
coneflower sunflower sage.
I knew I couldn't stay forever.