Imagines a particular field Robert
penumbral fallow small
abeam the ragged pale of town
imagines
roiling accumulus
of stormphosphor and the steam-engines
of cloud impurpled peeling thunder
heads to roll in
elemental blood
knotted air like whiplash expounding on
sporadic cedar straggly ash
and hemlock hissing the whirl of dirvilish
garble and barbwire ingroaning a
shudder through bewildered bindweed
and seething corn stalks
round and around
and innumerable in the milling wind
break voices vertiginious to twist
of fatal breath cyclonic in his hair
in the rising dark
––so beholds he at the fulcrum Her
lips moving the full
and auburn falling teetotum terra
caught around the terrible sable eyes
the spectral fortification
of an upraised hand her
thin white fingers splayed so wide apart.
____
They have nothing to do with me.
Quartet of crows advancing single-file
across the lawns of Harvard Divinity
picture-perfect grass and the trees well-
proportioned those rude arrogant bastards
wouldn’t even talk to him so fuck them
the gentle breezes ruffling his sheaf of standard-
ruled pages scribble of sound above him
“shadows of shadows and a small leaf––”
––”shadows of leaves and the small––and these––”
written words look back at him as if
from a great distance. Could I have chosen this?
He stands up scraps of colored paper
dropping from his pockets. Memories. Her.
_____
Robert gits nekkid, gallops through the snow
thick-stacked on stalk and stone, as plodes from deep
adown his lung a joyful whoop, rings out
across the Flatirons, far from home, where laden
pines draw up themselves like brime-dark surge
beneath the white flotillas, and like fire
the moonflux sparks and glistens and is not
consumed on icy, pendulous tongues, and tongues
to him a perfect nonsense, perfect light
dropping its silver coinage on the cliffs;
and then his best friend and his other friend
into the trees at various angles take
off, kicking like ivory gods through clouds of frost
or deep-sea silt aglitter in the monstrous dark,
their various voices he perceiving through
the woods fill up in echoes cross the mountains,
uphill now into the deep woods Robert
dream-slow runs, pitches his ascending
over natural wind-break, high-heaped, hid
sometimes, or plunges up to boyant thighs
to surface somewhere in a sudden pool
of brightness influent and silent forms
arboreal, my breath percussive in
the thrumming air-tight air, expounding heart
upon my lifeblood, lifting up my arms,
stretching me just as far as I will go,
and so I know this is a sea-change wrought
upon me as they gather, stepping lightly
on the snow, yet traceless under pliant
foot and ankle’s golden pulse, to turn
old shapes and substances perspicuous,
as my streaming breath aplomb fulfills
the whole sky, unpremeditated, un-
prepared-for as a future gives
the sudden tree, my new breath’s bursting forth
in starlight, sown several years ago
and sown in darkness O in darkness sown,
in darkness and in grief and unbeknownst
even to him, yet he has I have felt
this bearing fruit, this breath gone forth from me,
an ornament of grace, a reaching hand.
_____
Dreams of Minnesota mid-winter
suntipped lurch into grievous dusk
darkle of grizzled cornhusk
and hardwood shaw in bitter
cold shouldered air apparent
to appalling snow, as one
by one last high-lofted clouds burn
out, caste in disarticulating print
too for Robert dim to read his
self driftwalking perforce a way
from town, and does come, let’s say,
to where the telephone poles
lean out into the tenantless dark
and pauses, places side-by-
side his feet, boots creaking in bone-dry
snow. What will happen? Is it worth
while? Whereupon appears
unto him a little girl lying in a pool
of slush, beautiful but so pale
And what if it’s too late he whispers
as wind picks up over petrifying farms
––oh no––
and so slowly down
he still bends to her to lift the frozen
body pillow-light in his thin arms.
_____
A sudden twinge–
hunger?–
in the deep dark leguminous unknown whatsit of me
An awful awful clang
setting all my meticulous technologies
atremble– bolts shread, rivets pop,
all the patchworks of intention torn
apart at the seams,
the taught homologies
of my hard-earned loves unhinged, unpromised,
scattered and effaced,
my silly will
caught spinning and dallying
somewhere on the way towards itself–
and so my doing only undoes
and the whole thing goes.