Well, broken. Hunter comes by to look at the fallen maple trees for firewood, doesn’t think he can get his truck in but says yes anyway. At 4 a.m., the moonlight on the front stairs appears soft and bunched like cotton. We who shiver, who never send word.
What can I say about birds that has not been said before and does it matter and does mattering matter and who will say? The poem is always closer to a river than to a fish in the river. Goldenrod leaning in a northerly way, a winter-is-a-coming way. Belligerence, vigilance, disco dance, ants.
Unable to read the alarm clock and so getting up and only later – putting on glasses, pulling on jeans – seeing that it’s hours too early for waking but you’re up, so. You say it a certain way and those for whom it resonates come closer and ask you to say it again. Rethinking certain cities in western Massachusetts, the ones you drove through in your late teens, drunk and angry and wild with language. Geese angle away from the corn field for reasons one can only assume are practical.
We push against the various constraints and call our pushing freedom, yet it’s not so simple, hardly so clear. The ring left me by my grandfather, one I have never worn. She does not visit, which is okay, but still: one compensates for the absence, one does. In the hayloft, briefly brought up against a light that can only be called holy.
We to whom the new songs are not given. After midnight, walking past the garden in order to listen to the river, and to admire the mountains which are clear and nearly blue in moonlight. Our teachers have grown tired and ask only to be left alone. Stale bread with hard cheese, last of the coffee, and an apple sliced with Dad’s pocket knife.