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When they are not presence, out
leaping stone to stone, we miss
their artifacts. A gum wrapper, a cut nail,
bunnies of dust.

An ad means they were there,
thought about going, thought about
returning, worried about dark in the parking lot.
A crumpled sock in a corner
is an old frustration that speaks of weariness,
brake pedals, a whimper over a twisted
ankle, or the fit of a new shoe,
when such things mattered,
like the lives of fish.

Promises. We will go (we went), we will do
(we did), we shall make plans and plans
and make and make
as the river makes its directions,
rushes, bends its grass,
and follow through until the next are made
and there are more socks to be tossed,
more rivers to fill,
more smiles when we enter the room,
and the soap in the tray will once more
drip with promises made and kept.

A trivial note will mean something other.
New, it might have closed, soon
forgotten moments after scribing;
old, it opens onto crickets, a fresh breeze,
that same river the color of frogs;
it remakes a thought, an idea, unassuming,
unknown so that all notes or gum
wrappers hide the thorns of a rose.

Unwashed door knobs are a clock of the years passing.
The songs you once heard bend around the walls.
Our job may be to listen for meaning
before meaning,
to learn today
as the unfolding of a wrinkled scribble
crushed at the bottom of a drawer,
that everything lost waits for its finding,
everything come morning time,
a thing found.

A cloud of crows
crosses the sun,
so like sagacious nails
dragged on a window screen
with casual passing.

In fits,
Summer rushes
with the sound of wings,
heats us
for the silences of winter
tinted blue and coming hard
on the browning leaves.

People watch them
in the water glass,

a shadow
of crows
makes the sun
matter all the more
when the air turns
quiet, like a heavy door closed
and locked.

The wind bends
a blade and another
and then another bends
at their shoes
with another wind
and they yearn for the return
of the crows
and what can be seen
and smelled
so near the sun.

a man will pick
bones up by the river bank
and call it fish

benighting
his knowing
to the water with a smile
and tip of a cap

fooled to the last
as the stars
cut the sky into
universe
or butter

see that glass one
shatter into
green, purple, crafty,
that complication of phlox
into which the artifact
has passed,

here’s to dead men
and the bones of fish

The surface of the sea becomes
red feathers on the steady back
and forth of the bear fired by the sun
as he stops on the sand, says,
why stop there?

Dip your finger again and draw my loves,
my children, my futures,
my shadow in a lamp,

horses playing on confetti, cats
ambulating into orange rabbits
among fruit pickings. Stop not.
Draw swift as tigers striking
the sun green with their lime-colored calls.

They remind me of something I found
under a stone big as a grave:
a smiling jaw, eyes that smelled
of coriander and peach
and an echo that moved
the sand to glass.

In Chihuahua I saw a dog with yellow ribs
and a face like a broken shovel.

South, I saw her again, in an alley
where children buried stones. I told my friend

the dog’s following, daily, like an unfilled
hole. He said it’s not the same dog just some

everywhere dog with yellow ribs and a howl
like dandelions crowding the wild foot hills

under rain and hail and microbursts that tear
the trees into shadow. I said, it’s the same dog

following and nothing he said will change
me because I can’t admit that those sounds

marking the hills might be armies, storms,
the stripes of a tiger on the hull of a dog.

In the river glass he sees war go by
in colors flat as paint chips, the moon
hanging dry and eyeball white
between two black branch cracks
so serene as to call up memories
of bodies hanging at the walls by bullet holes.

After come faces that smile then glower
at the stars, roll away and call deep
to the sleeping stones. Bone chips,
then, turning with the steady current
like compass needles. Igneous cities, human
elbows treated with scrapes nudging
the twinking light into the shapes of sea green fish.

Obsession like ribbons of yesterday
when he beat his head against a wall
come with the sound of distant booms
that shake the falling leaves in their cups of silver air.

Such lavish depth in the quiet glass, such acidity
in the glitter, bright with organic sludge.
He senses a drift in the continents, some offset
to the geometry of galaxies and their modest tug
on the blood behind his eyes and the water
where a finger’s traced a multitude of lives
ascending on the canvass. He raises a hand,
salutes the vines, and descends to his eyes into the cold.

I lived in a small hole for a week.
When I came forth a brown bird
gave me a seed and clung to my finger
with nails like kitten claws.
That day I saw every autumn leaf
on the taper of an oak.