It is winter;
the trees are standing
on the stones.
Tips unsteady,
their branches wavering
under the weight of their trunks;
terminal buds, chock-full
of next year’s growth,
constantly stirring,
searching for precarious balance
in the cloud-whitened
shallows.
Bare toros, stems
seem pedestals
standing on arteries,
arterioles.
floors
we stand on
saw you
my love
on your ice floe
passing
waved but
you were gone
blades skimming
through desolate
heavens
ah lover
it was the flight
we fell for
passing
is what we are
Smoke from his pipe
were spirits rising
from the dead;
they coiled into the air,
graceful tresses,
defused and dissipated.
He needed sunlight
for this sorcery;
his ghosts, silvery white
hung momentarily,
umbilical, heavenward;
he was at peace then.
To turn, on eyes opening,
find again that blank space beside you;
come downstairs,
witness to the still-birth of another day;
a receptacle of words, restless
to be heard but no ear to hear them;
to move, room to room,
through the obdurate indifference of objects;
remembering warmth in memories
that leave you to its shivering absence.
Sometimes I wish I was living in a crossroads town,
less than really, a bar, a grocery store, a water tower,
far away from any place of consequence. Here heat is a cube,
in summer; people are encased in it, flies in amber.
You walk outside to look at the day, then retreat inside again;
time is irrelevant; all day is heat, every hour the same
till night comes. Nothing of note has happened since the sixties:
a fire that gathered the population together for six hours,
smoked for a day or two, then went out;
that old shop’s still there like a rotten tooth.
There’s no traffic to speak of, the wires come in on high poles,
the line of them, askew in places; you see them into the distance;
there’s nothing on the landscape to obscure the view;
turn your head, ditto in the opposite direction.
When a wind gets up, it lifts the dust, everywhere’s covered;
the view through a window gives a grey tone to the landscape,
but that’s fine, dust is part of the appeal.
People are old; they grew old while they were still young;
it is their way of dealing with the heat and emptiness; their faces
are parched soil with bright eyes embedded, and they’re gentle.
Time has stopped in my town; there’s no one racing with it,
there’s no point; that’s the way I like it.
You stood at the side of the road,
snow-covered and, as yet, unmarked.
I watched you from the window:
at first, filling your eyes with its perfection,
then weighing printing your footsteps
against being the first to leave a blemish.
And before you had even turned,
I knew your decision.
