In the Wake, and: Through the Barn Door, and: A Dream in Wartime

In the Wake
September 22, 2001

Remembering lowering
coffins we pass

slings beneath
dense posts, dense beams

the carpenter signed
precisely with mortise

and tenon (last night's
rain in the hollows)

and left us unskilled
amateurs, love, to

lift, haul, fit,
then tap together,

and peg by lumber's
give and tough grain,

and raise into
a barn frame,

square and plumb
beneath reeling stars.

Overlook Farm, Heifer Project International, Rutland, Massachusetts

Through the Barn Door

At this hour,
sky and swallows
take up each
other's colors.

In this light,
tiny feathers
fan open the
substance of heaven.

*

Too diffused for new leaves to hold
after sundown, wide heaven's fine
as this swallow's breast. In the big dark barn,
Elena leans to scrappy, peeping

chicks pecking feed and dust,
her face by the incubator light
a tawny moon, her eyes
my reckoning stars.

*

Swallows dart through the
barn as if it's all
sky. What shelters us,

and shelters in us,
and flies on through

sure as stars, when we're
long gone
and the barn falls down?

A Dream in Wartime

Nothing is plumb
but the child
who, dangling, climbs
into the well

to patch the cracked,
shifted, settled
circle of cut,
fitted stones,

and even while random
blasts overhead
punch lung, gut,
drum marrow,

set off tremors
in every limb,
light the optic
nerve like a fuse,

stun the inner
ear's subtleties,
panic heartbeat
to ragged thread,

still waits to be
hauled up by those
who refuse to
let go of the rope.