Reginald Shepherd

For Robert Philen You are like me, you will die too, but not today: you, incommensurate, therefore the hours shine: if I say to you “To you I say,” you have not been set to music, or broadcast live on the ghost radio, may never be an oil painting or Old Master’s charcoal sketch: you are a concordance of person, number, voice, and place, strawberries spread through your name as if it were budding shrubs, how you remind me of some spring, the waters as cool and clear (late rain clings to your leaves, shaken by light wind), which is where you occur in grassy moonlight: and you are a lily, an aster, white trillium or viburnum, by all rights mine, white star in the meadow sky, the snow still arriving from its earthwards journeys, here where there is no snow (I dreamed the snow was you, when there was snow), you are my right, have come to be my night (your body takes on the dimensions of sleep, the shape of sleep becomes you): and you fall from the sky with several flowers, words spill from your mouth in waves, your lips taste like the sea, salt-sweet (trees and seas have flown away, I call it loving you): home is nowhere, therefore you, a kind of dwell and welcome, song after all, and free of any eden we can name

Petrarch dreams of pebbles on the tongue, he loves me at a distance, black polished stone skipping the lake that swallows worn-down words, a kind of drown and drench and quench and very kind to what I would've said. Light marries water and what else (unfit for drinking purposes), light lavishes my skin on intermittent sun. (I am weather and unreasonable, out of all season.  Petrarch loves my lies of laurel leaves, ripped sprigs of deciduous evergreen.) A creek is lying in my cement-walled bed, slurring through the center of small town; the current's brown and turbid (muddy, turbulent with recent torrents), silt rushing toward the reservoir. A Sonata passes by too close (I have to jump) and yes I do hear music here. It's blue, or turquoise, aquamarine, some synonym on wheels, note down that note. It's Petrarch singing with his back to me (delivering himself to voice), his fingers filled with jonquil, daffodils, mistaken narcissus. (I surprised him between the pages of a book, looked up the flowers I misnamed.) Forsythia and magnolia bring me spring, when he walks into the house he has wings. Song is a temporary thing (attempt), he wants to own his music.

Sir star, Herr Lenz, white season body master snapping masts in half, absent winds’ workmanship: what window will I look you through, what brook, stream creaking past fretwork weeds, clouds in the context of cold? Lord knot to be untied, skiff hard alee ill winds: a hiss of wish and cinders and I am warm, crossing dazed oceans by hand to sow the doubtful sea with drought. Mine of rain and seize and sluice, you change your mind again, a rage for green waves’ open vowels, undrinkable. No talking to the weeds, no talking with the snow.

I drift into the sound of wind, how small my life must be to fit into his palm like that, holly leaf, bluejay feather, milkweed fluff, pin straw or sycamore pod, resembling scraps of light. The world slips through these fingers so easily, there’s so much to miss: the sociable bones linked up in supple rows, mineral seams just under the skin. I hold my palm against the sun and don’t see palm or sun, don’t hold anything in either hand. I look up, look away (what’s that?), I trip and stumble (fall again), find myself face down in duff, a foam of fallen live oak leaves, with only this life, mine at times.