DARLING RUN NOTEBOOK
goldenrod polling the rail scar’s winter margin
rhymed gaze the water divests itself from
at a turn in arrested regard a prayer takes form
lifts it, as from the eye’s heavy grasp
prayer, which has no breath, because it is breath
hemlock shot through with gift’s strange proxy
deer path straight down revealed in fresh snow
winter pokeweed not at all metaphysical
(the way November is not at all metaphysical)
fresh trace of new moon upon the damaged bar
a breach that mimes the breath efflorescing
plenitude of the mapped mind unmapping itself
along the ridge’s upturned contour, a bruise
in the act of becoming a sustained mediation
I hurl my thought into it, listen for the skips
once, twice on the surface of that water
brinksmanship of thought’s alloyed forbearance
red-tailed hawk flaring overhead, unagented
to persevere, in the cause of subsidence
(i.e. to decline as through some grammar)
I teach myself anew what breath is capable of
the holly pronouncing its durable silence
over & against the schists’ competing reticence
trace of contrast the mind brushes against
a new chill in this season of fixed apparitions
the tremor in my left arm reminding me
I’m a dumb grass being blown through gently
so what does weaken mean, in this place
is it a solstice, is it a musk, is it a compunction
bright hawk’s appetite steady at perihelion
memory promotes its museum of faults
tenderly, it seems to think, & I fear them
pealingly, after the manner of the undeposed
ELEGY FOR CAMILLE PISSARRO
All the shades of grief, versus meat. Fields of meat starting to burn,
or underground, like the catacombs. A new grief,
collapsed briefly into the human penalty of thinking.
It dissolves the chain of censorship although it’s not a milk. The grief
of milk, an old grief, like the grief of teeth as physical presences
rather than as visions of what can be known
versus what can’t. All the seasons are waves in the wheat
of emotions, not poems. A season is never a poem. We are moved,
or else we aren’t. It’s your birthday. Someone
goes looking for a fresh sheet of paper, but they don’t tell us why.
