Currents

Out

When thunder tore the darkI woke and smelled the rainalone in another houseand all that held me gone.

I'd hurt you in the nightand left the day to bleedand cast my self awayto chance it like a weed.

Necessity

Below the blinkered traffic on the road,almost unseen, the creek falls as it must,called by downhill, called by the waxing moon—who judges how its clarity responds?

As night pours in, I hunker on the bankbelow a water birch, and watch the lightcontend with not-light in the pools and channels,the way a boulder or a gravel bar

can bend the current without alteringnecessity, the bed-ward conversation.The water talks like an old woman knownfor knowing names of every man she touched.

She goes on falling, falling, you might say,unfailingly, the one consistent joy from snowmelt on the peak to this plain dirt,pebbles and kayak leaves marooned on twigs,

while I am crouching in the dark, betrayedby distances. I think again of youwho love the water and are far away,and I go falling where the water goes.

Leavings

How naked, how bereftthat wall of picture hookswhere faces used to make me cringe,how sad the shelvesunloaded of their library, how likeanother life the furnacesighs to an empty house,the decades it took a dresserto leave its carpet mark,its unvacuumed blur of dust.

Of six who lived here oncefour are dead.They've gone out before us.I close the door, haunted.

From a Side Yard

The truck, a relicrusting in the shade,drove from anothercentury to thispunctured standstill,a weird flute in the wind.

With its cracked glassand metal and warpedboards it admits youto the fargallery of grass,the hills brushed

by rivering death,that other road               beside the road you travel,an artery stillrunning under ice,a loyalty, a life.

The Quire

She stands at the effigy of Donneand tears eruptfrom lines a lifetime gone.

His combed beard and heightened cheeks,eyes closed in the lightest sleep,lips that sermoned pursed in secret peace,

robed knees that will no longer kneel,almost a lion wan with piety,he resembles someone known

through sun and rain. There sheremains—my true love cryingabout a man again.