Passage III

cold birds still sing a bright sun chill air snow entombing precocious crocuses tricked by a spring now falsened ❏ cherry trees ... Good Friday ... —treatise: on the use of trees ❏ a flyblown carcass in the underbrush below the cypress in the cemetery : the dead above : the dead below ❏ like a Fantin-Latour the clutch of flowers in your hand and apple frothing the air ❏ the life you're not leading the blood you're not bleeding the knot you're not kneading the mouth you're not feeding the earth you're not seeding ❏ they're grooming the lawns for the graduates and the proud parents and meanwhile the yellowthroat sings unconcerned— cherries just gone by their faded blossoms thick against the insurgent leaves offer the very figure of spring melancholy o I missed when they were fully in bloom & the season & the time for the perfect spring haiku to hail another winter survived where among the redbud blooms exploding along the thin branches is my death written ❏ earth conspiring against me have a child to load the earth with vines with lives with signs songs & cries ❏ insistent crow cardinal whoop peepers booming open the night stabbing life into your heart the odious air reverberant ❏ that was no song but an alarm call ❏ the rhythmic thunk of the basketball thwacking the tarmac at the little park a block over . . . boys . . . calls . . . and the rain holding off— a May nor'easter deferring the fullest spring we might have had but leaving the lilacs to extend their delicate thrusting into the air the boys birds and blossoms share ❏ say that a heron perched immobile until alert the head turns ❏ the weather is far more violent here and present or so it seems days one's attention is open to the cloudthrottled air lit by a near-equinoctial sun—the nights too extend to a farther horizon the stars legible in this particular sky to those able and wishing to scry, too many years looking inward thinning the lexicon of the visible world its oracular reality sounding itself all along these maples that stone that garden fountain the mists rolling in over the mountains disguising the sky the world gone slate its greens drained as that fountain before the first frost the rain is passing and the lilacs the thunder the day but what have you held beheld beset as you are by yourself ❏ signing my best beset instead reveals itself the key an extra e lone vowel tiny howl I did not do what my hands did ❏ wavelap and lakeslap lick the ear; the air carries stripes in the low precincts of sky— a mower blares somewhere above A and shuts off a shock of silence into which the wave- slaps surge ❏ to enter the water in Mayan to die ❏ over there the gray gathering sheath meant rain but our private sun continues to sign- post a clear day at least for us. an earthquake in China means precisely what to me wondered Adam Smith— the world disappearing the instant my tooth aches: Sartre my skin some days extends as wide as the sea and the waves of the world roll through, equable terrible but I am living this narrow life and no other except yours I imagine some days we're graced or grazed by a shared bullet ❏ today no thrush silvered the air in the woods the wind blowing hard against the bike passing a stretch of field where tractors for miles around come to die the iron congregation rusting faithful as the grass, the cows at Saywards Farm seemed too confined why aren't they grazing in the field and why are their calves wired in— late last night after the sunset I did not see the lake took on that babyish blue I so love and I saw a sole balloon aloft lifting over Vergennes puffing by Camel's Hump and heading east— we have harnessed the air for our pleasure our leisure a rhyme with the weather clearing as if the skies cared or could ❏ radios and weathervanes conduct the air disperse manes ❏ mountains deforested by distance Hokusai shapes cut against the sky the clouds address just so and through the same air the radio pours its usual brew of cheer & death what wonder little schizo you reel so in the fractured world the sky bends to my way and to yours and to home sweet home ❏ my soul marching through the open fifths of its salvation shapenotes shaping me home ❏ not the sun but the sun in the river not the moon but the lake-swallowed moon the stars cracking open the black paved road where immortals strode