The Appalachian Book of the Dead

Sunday, September Sunday ... Outdoors, Like an early page from The Appalachian Book of the Dead, Sunlight lavishes brilliance on every surface, Doves settle, surreptitious angels, on tree limb and box branch, A crow calls, deep in its own darkness, Something like water ticks on Just there, beyond the horizon, just there, steady clock ... Go in fear of abstractions ... Well, possibly. Meanwhile, They are the strata our bodies rise through, the sere veins Our skins rub off on. For instance, whatever enlightenment there might be Housels compassion and affection, those two tributaries That river above our lives, Whose waters we sense the sense of late at night, and later still. Uneasy, suburbanized, I drift from the lawn chair to the back porch to the dwarf orchard Testing the grass and border garden. A stillness, as in the passageways of Paradise, Bell jars the afternoon. Leaves, like ex votos, hang hard and shine Under the endlessness of heaven. Such skeletal altars, such vacant sanctuary. It always amazes me How landscape recalibrates the stations of the dead, How what we see jacks up the odd quotient of what we don’t see, How God’s breath reconstitutes our walking up and walking down. First glimpse of autumn, stretched tight and snicked, a bad face lift, Flicks in and flicks out, a virtual reality. Time to begin the long division.