Gathering at the Hearth

Here is the memory of smoke, of ash, as old as the ground

beneath us, this watching through deep-set eyes the first fields.

And after the neighbor boy drowned, I saw his father standing

one evening by the river's edge, the moon curling its pelvic bone

above the trees. And I imagined prayers clinging to grass stalks

or slipping into the sluggish current of the river, as though the body

remembers being mud and rain, remembers the slack pink rope

of last light. And I watched four vultures in the distance

with their blood-red heads, levitating in air, the centrifuge of evening

separating gray from black.