Coyote
In the tender early silence of a day you imagine belongs to you
already the contours of the night before forgotten and what that night told
when you went through the dark house
marking disturbances of light
along the windowsills and how the stars
through the glassy distance seemed to have grown uncertain
of their own
falling through time
in that new hour you slipped outside into the open night
the moon shining down onto the mudflat
small bands of water breaking
rims of silver light chasing up from the depths
over the smooth moving blackness
onto the flat in the dead low tide
it occurred to you then that the coyote you saw
six hours before on the rock called Devil’s Footprint
by now must have crossed back over
the surf was a hollow sound far off
falling toward you
and you wanted only to stay
to empty yourself into the last of that moon
unevenly reflected on the pocked surface of the flat
still those strange chasing rims of light in the shallows
reminding you of something you cannot remember.
The light comes fast now, the wind gone soft even as the tide still runs
and you can feel the soft tracks of a creature
moving through you
the noiseless prints it leaves in the mud that will be gone
by the next tide’s rising
The Clearing
Not long after
below the hayfields
at the edge of the clearing
where the old half-sunken wall runs
I thought I saw you standing
slightly apart from the rest
a coat draped over your arm
your eyes still following me
at the time it was midsummer
and not easy to recognize what I saw or did not see
a body in flight and the shadow it throws in the leaving
there was too much sun on the water
spilled light in my hands
the water holding every failed and fallen color
of the sky holding the night coming on
and the sound of a child running
somewhere through the house
every window flung open
every name on the wind rushing in
I could have turned to you then and said
this is the life I have made
the river freezes the snow falls
the snow rots down the river thaws
the swallows fly out the end of winter into spring
across the fields thick with the sun touching
in that most intimate way the outer edges of things
and when the hay is cut
in the evening it lies
the blue and silver color of the sea
I stand at the edge of the clearing
near the old half-sunken wall where you stood once
as the wild lilies open
for their one day
into fire.
Wilbour Woods
Past the old burying yard comes the turn
into the woods where we have not gone
a long time since forgetting
the stillness held in the sweet thick fern
nothing yet to show the pull to autumn
already hidden somewhere in the green
the trout stream runs
dried up in places now to dark black mud
and the winding scent of wild swamp rose
honeysuckle
pine
we come into the cleared lit space
around the pond where the trees have grown up
long and ashen shadows of themselves
the same trees that met us once at dusk
years ago when we were young
and the fireflies were everywhere
as if they had just hatched out
you ask if I remember–
a pair of thin-necked birds lift off
carving through the sky reflected
in the still murk
their wings nick the surface
pale bodies in flight cast down
they pass like rain across our hands
and disappear into the brush
moving shapes our eyes strain for
holding the promise of a moment
we have not yet entered.