The Dune
Now that the thread has caught fire,
the hem lies ragged.
Now that the pain throbs deep,
the vein appears.
The vacant sky above,
the funneled hours, the whirling
days, each yanked away
to night that follows night.
Now that the little lies
accrue into the vast
incredulity, fear on fear
swells: a wave.
Slipping down the dune or
climbing? Who can tell?
The small cries, growing smaller,
fly past and vanish.
Were they gulls or drowning children
–and who was meant to hear
and who to act? The spare grass
dead beside the carapace
emerging. The shell soon cuts
its form into the strand
and stays. You despaired,
abandoned,
but then you saw
the cornflower, felled
within the bramble, the menace in
the permanence of sand.
The hollow tree
Sialia sialis—the eastern bluebird relies upon a hollow tree
I
Your lips to its lips place of
secrets between
the living and the dead, though living
place or dead place I cannot tell.
Soft mouth within/ /against the rigid bark.
old leather heart
unyielding.
II
A doe lifting high steps across
the foaming stream.
Like a current, life under the surface.
A flame flaring
nimble, contained, the fire holding fire
as a body only body
cambium
phloem
and sap flowing up and up, countering
whatever draws
the roots down,
asunder.
III
Yet something stable still, a witness unmoving
heartwood, year after years–
an infant in a
white cotton cap
lying on a blanket
in the shade
one, then two, head to toe, toe to head
then jousting dreams
of knights playing conkers, knocking hard their satin-sided
seeds
where the blue plank floated by ropes below
the broad five-fingered leaves.
IV
Vertigo, sing the spinning swing then turn and turn
in the other direction, push
to the sky so your hair sweeps the ground,
the pendulum comes slowly
to its rest.
V
Everything reciprocates
everything turns back
to the start, to the force
of beginning–
equal and opposite,
with one exception:
the path from heat
to cold.
(a patch of sunlight there
where the hollow tree once stood
and you, just now,
held lightly in its light.)