Dust Day

Here is the shape of a bird,its geometries of movement

that seem no more significantthan a dust devil swirling past a willow.

There are always these questionsof equivalences: is the mud in the field

the same basic substance as the clouds,the same as the air inside the lungs?

At twenty-two I was on my ownfor the first time, the apartment’s

back window looking out on an open field,the front to dark cars and dark clothes

and a ceaseless gathering of mourners.I sat evenings on the bed and wrote to you

about feeling like the discarded skinof a snake left as an empty bracelet

on the grass. And each time I glanced outone window there was gray smoke lifting from

the funeral home crematorium,out the other a freight of gray clouds

drifting above the distant river.Is the smoke of the body the same

as the entrails of a catfish,as the sound of a hearse lumbering

its complaint along a road?Once I watched a hawk swoop low to the grass,

reach down the hook of its talons,lift from the field a snake.

The writhing creature must have been amazed:finally the world was giving way beneath it.

And the last time you visited you lefta pair of sandals

I later perched as a reliquaryon the window sill.

I wrote from my bedthat we are complicit in dust, are the dark

wings of the distant birds, the driftingoutlines of a life.

And what if our handsare the discarded skin of a snake?

To love like that, to wear the emptinessof the bracelet all around us.