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Eleven Days Before Spring

Daphne

A many-leaved hesitance
focused me.  The leaves
blew, rashly.  The drift
accumulated, spoke by spoke.

How else to see, through
shining tiers, the charged
disheveled flyway?

In the Country

    for Kate Stapleton


1.

Nights of reading
fed my seriousness.
The print bulged,
heavy with sap.
The sap glowed.  Trees
of my youth, and
the sun through them,
its strange sourceless
maturity...

2.

               Helmless
dusk enters the yard
to the sound of bath
water.  The dim water,
the porcelain parlor,
luminously cool...From
its single high prisoner's
window, the moon looks
out.  Down the listing
corridor—we used to joke
handrails were needed—
the tops, the very tops
of the trees were blowing like a gate.

3.

In Chekov, in spring,
nothing happens for the first time.

The Drawer

I opened the drawer of the woods,
the woods' dresser.
What I saw fooled me.  Orchid-

white pillows damp as breath;
snow-bright jealousy.

It was late in
September.

Garaged in a cloud,
the blue sun blew
west, madly, coldly.

Insomniac

It came to force.  Force
of the oddities
of one's attention, the plow's
quaking heel.  Dark
moon, white leaves.
Among the leaves, no quaking.

Miles to Go

Slow driver, the moon's
bonked headlight
sniffing the way
for miles...Longevity
is delicate, the wind-
shield glowing, the snow
fainting, again and again.

Snowlight

The mind's a lonesome flourish,
stark as deviation's
branch before the snow;
a dark cabin ogled by snowlight.

Crossing the hacked up sea
of snow, the moon
waist-high, lunging and
capitulating, addressed by
resources that make no sound.