On the way back, it rained. Wind blew

the rain, in regimented gusts,

across the asphalt, shivering

the car. The road, gray as the river,

kept to the river, led as though blind.

 

It was on this drive back in the rain—

I say that it was on this drive,

since these things rarely, if ever, know

where they come from—that I thought again,

as if for the first time, headlights

of an oncoming car sprinkling

into view, the slithering hiss

of the downpour turned up by the slash

of passing, and the wipers whacking

back and forth, spreading the water

like Vaseline on a piece of toast,

that I thought again, and hopefully,

for the last time, that I might drag

up from the bottom, shovel-mouthed

and scaly, squinting at the light,

some creature equal to the way

life happens on an afternoon,

flooded with sensation, but

with nothing on its mind to tell

where it came from, what it wanted,

other than to keep us rafting

this waterfall of urgencies

in a storm of interrupted calms.

 

Red thread, circle of flame, small noose,

I wear a string around my neck

these days. It’s supposed to protect me.

From what, I forgot to ask the man

who gave it to me. I knew I would need it

someday, so I took it and thanked him.

I may have always needed it,

but I had gone about the perilous

intricacies of being afloat

in the world without it, without

even suspecting I might need it,

not knowing such a thing could be.

And I had survived. I was still here.

This is my hand.

The little knot

at the front won’t stay at the front,

so I tug at it from time to time.

The perils I thought would be mine

were not, and the little string with the knot

that won’t stay at the front of the neck,

fraying, tied there until it rots,

reminds me of my ignorance,

that I will never exhaust it,

that the sun rises somewhere, always.

 

The charcoal greens of the white pines

wet down by last night’s rain packed tight

in cloud. We could be out in that field

counting the footprints of a vole,

the number of wings on a dragonfly,

how long it would take to forget

who we were, long enough to come

up with an answer. The fog hawks

slowly over the river stones,

lifts off when it has seized its meat.

 

Reading Durrell again. Exotic

isolation, exiles from

the ordinary, prisoners

of exquisite ripples drawn by the wind

across the sand. No past except

the palimpsest all pasts have scratched

faintly on our breath and breathing,

like the glacial markings on the bare

stone of the mountaintops I look at

each day. And floating through my mind

that line about the crow I wrote years ago

but couldn’t find a home for, and so let

rattle about at the back of my mind,

an idea stumbled on

in thinking, one that imitates

the hidden movements of the sky,

the crow perhaps, the crow itself.

 

Late May. The glower of the clouds

low in the shallow valley, river

trembling in its banks. The tall candles

of the pines begin to flare. Never

has grass been greener or the dirt

more lovely to turn. It falls with a sigh

back to the earth. Worms are ecstatic.

The beetle shouts, Come see, come see.

I bang the clods against the tines

of the fork. Dirt drops on the dirt.

I pick a stone from its teeth and take it

up to the house humming something

unrecognizable but true.

 

 

 

Continue my researches into clouds.

Clouds keep secrets better than stones, better

than years. Today they float above me, a fleet

of barges cut loose from outer space.

Maybe they wish they were down here sponging

the last shivers of winter off the twigs.

That big one in the middle of the sky

looked at me, I think. He likes the way

I’m sitting here on the deck scribbling

with the dog handy at my side. I have

so much to do, am only half-way in

this life, but the other half is watching

the afternoon’s best cloud come undone

so slowly it can’t be seen. If I turn away, though,

then back, there it is. Everything has changed.

 

 

 

Yesterday, I went out into the world,

and as often happens on days like this,

there was poetry and rain and a long drive

in the car and people who had lived

so long in their own worlds and been

so long themselves the world seemed

invented just then, unaccountable

and just like it was, gathered next

to a river rushing against its banks

so hard and fast the stones quivered.

Who were they to have lived so long

under a mountain, away in a valley,

way off in a life like mine, and why hadn’t

we met, or did we, and did we forget

when we went there? Yet there we were.

It was like a reunion of strangers,

of people we’d never been or known,

but people we knew we would be

one day and be glad to come back

to the place we left before the river

began and the town slid and the rain.

It was an afternoon, and we all looked

at each other like we knew something

it was so hard to know, and so old,

it was new, though we’d always known it,

and again, still, couldn’t say what it was.

 

 

 

I was out last evening

with the dog and the wind

and the light going down

and the trees up in their branches

beginning to sway.

And the dog and I sat

on the grass and let the air

go by, plus whatever it is

that air requires to be

what it is, transparence,

most likely, insistence

on being everywhere.

It was soft and smooth

and the new spring leaves,

lemon green in their newness,

caught just enough of the wind

to carry off the meaning

of being anywhere but here

on the grass beside a dog,

taking as much of it in

as we could and letting the rest,

whatever it was, find

other minds to tease.

It seemed for a moment this

was what we had, or were,

a laze on the grass with a dog

and the wind sanding the air.

It was like we were not there,

that all the contraption of being

was meant to help us see

by first keeping us from seeing

how pleasantly the wind

stole and calmly the dog lay

across the grass, and finally

how succulently held

in the mouth of the wind

we and everything were.