Winter Journal: Fish Rises, Dark Brown Muscle Turns Over

rings diminish, duck reflects flight then threads off Long branch of land, rusted oaks smoldering fawn shore, grasses bare scripts of green black fingerbones of the willows, splayed rubric fringe of the reeds at the edge of water The reflection is its own blurred dream The blended edges, furred thing tawny path of stalks brushed into gray slope behind Bright yellow mostly gone now, the dominance of dulled bronze, ochrous, ferrous grooves of the several oaks The wrought planes and hinges of things Strange, held-off symmetry, axis of waterline rubbed, smeared, edge-shifted What is real then made more so through an intervention of element The chipmunk’s tail jerks in synch with its mouth-pops Stares hard at me from a dead willow stump Who are you and what have you done? Things moving in the leaves behind me. Dog barks from far across fields Single bird oars across lake The sky deep in: dark oxygens crimp of leaf edging in dried weed stalk miniature seedpods held forward calligraphic against gray water, white stones chipmunk-rustle, upturn duff, chirp storm whirl off, hold still hold still Gravity picks and fidgets How each blade and bract is angled just so arches, etched kerns scroll of deft beech leaf Baroque script of dried vines their wall of texture coming down Crows burr into woods fish plinks through and slacks under ducks quilt across sky, through sky-water mottled beads hovering, unchaining Reflection is a real thing set in perpetual motion, as if electron spinning and jittering made visible the static progressions The waving laminations of white stone the wandering rift through the pulse-veins Breathing thing, made to breathe, graven so Now the delicate hammers pure cuts of bird steel rings reassembling Quit path under oak Something moves off a dark road Deep-embroidered quiet the tickets slip thicket in meter-tick of duck taking off keep close, brush close to surface furl between bird and mirror-bird I am vested in sensation a suspension of yellow maple amid stalks of oak distillate of leaves saffron particulate Deep sea of trees, fanned tops of oak corals, collective bend fast tappers high up flapping across water back up the damp trough trees closing in two deer pick across, turn back clatter through woods encircling