More on: Poetry

I hear these words in your voice no matter who says them, in the well-water smell of the basement, by the artificial tree you and she would one day put a sheet over, so you never had to take it down or put it up again.

Easter, I make myself space 
in a pew facing a pillar  
four feet wide, I’d say, gray,  
mottled, plastered countenance.

Everything close enough fades  

in the coming dark; what’s at a distance, 
gone.

The spaded earth spurts in fury: 
a geyser of yellow jackets torque  

from their lair.

days like my lost eyelashes, 
just dry leaves curled there and here,  

Now you are a monotonousness of grace- 
light under my steps, the unseen seen.

Because we die, we all die, and the oak lives, 
those imagined rings like so many glasses 

We step over the barbed wire into the pasture,
overtaken by another giddiness.

We will be the young tufts of spring. 
My shadow will lay itself down over yours, reader.
We will not cut ourselves open any longer.  

The orchard blooms, 

and strangers tend, in wooded plots (or tombs), 
blue nightshade, to the bitter end of gene.