Zodiac
Days
The
sun in Virgo, and the wild wheat ripens…
wind
emblem, time’s high hawk a falling flame,
the
same years passing for you, for me,
always
the same years passing.
Light
settles earthward.
The
day’s broken English calls up the ghosts.
Under
lightning-stroke boughs
of
pines big as planets, I walk in dust,
in
thousand-year shadows, remembering rain.
On
my face, roselight illumination
and
salt the winds untangle from the sea—
birches
pivot, flickering silver,
the
sky here bigger, stretched, and the clouds
upward,
infinite, a crooked circuit
constellations
ride, defining dust,
this
emergency of time and space, this life,
this
image broken and remade
as
the concentricities of love subside:
the
decades drift and shimmer,
the
past wells up, presently,
and
the future that was lost returns.
September
streams, flyfishing
in
the shade of the far bank, my whipline
worrying
the water’s calm, looping geometry
pops
and skitters, snags a branch submerged:
a
strike of bass,
against
the reel and pull the running
taut
silver scatters insects waterwalking,
and
we, sheltering from rain in the oaken hulk,
the
tumble-down of centuries
in
the tilled earth texture of the tree—
carved
our names below the year
to
prove we were alive,
there
and now in the night around us,
no
sound but the night around us:
rivers
of stars.
Who
can contend with hawk wing and pine?
We
were Americans, settled in the tidal reaches,
our
fortunes in a wilder province, generations passing—
cook
fires, graves, the continent we cleared,
by
pole barge down the wide Ohio,
rafts
stripped for shelter,
shored
against the warrior tribes, the wilderness dead,
that
other life: something you hear, stoneheaded cane
owl
feathers steady
flying,
from the undergrowth the acid yell,
the
hurtling shape and hand axe, closing.
We
meet in dreams, in a strange country
on
paths we name as the hour of our birth is named,
our
alias cut in living oak,
from
muleback track to Hiroshima’s torn sun,
the
hipshake and hard sell of a century on the run:
we
who broke the wilderness,
we
who answer in our time.
This
day both distant past and future,
beneath
that broken sky, working late
correcting
the diaries of the masses,
I
lean into a wall of rain,
past
pale cafés, neon shards in silhouette.
A
woman’s face, elegant, adrift in water-colour panes,
regards
my own, briefly… no…
she
gazes at herself: I do not exist.
Down
Thunder Road, the icons fade.
Fragments
of a former life,
the
wind blows through the clouds’ brocade,
deconstructing
Elvis.
Southern
living ’sixty-six:
three-chord
rock on sixstring electrics,
our
gear slung out behind the stand,
those
rednecks expecting a bluegrass band,
the
Fender amp I hired sent tumbling
but
the girls there begging autographs,
that
mountain town—
sullen
road gangs and the roadhouse
cool
dark in yellow light
smoke
and the dust of men on day-release from jail,
swollen
faces and the shakes, men
walking
the blade and lives burning down,
on
the door the sign, whites only—
heart
of Dixie in an old Thunderbird,
on
hot nights with a six-pack and the girls,
we
shadow our birth star in billion year orbits,
dogging
luck down the back roads,
long
gone daddy.
The
wind blows through.
Clear,
still pools and soundless:
languid,
glittering sorbet scales glide by.
Our
boat rocks in the flickering dark.
The
dead rise up and circle the moon,
long,
tree-rimmed, corpse-woven light
bright
as the world, the presence beside me,
rivers
of stars.
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