Now the long evenings begin.
Two Amish girls are running
on the far side of the meadow.
A milk bucket joins their arms,
splashes frost on the thistle weeds.
Their dresses wrap around
their legs like ancient bruises, once
blue, now purple and black. Each
braid slaps the wind’s face,
each thin leg stabs the frost.
This porch is the edge of
the world; I am not lying
when I say that to step
off the end of a plank like this
is to walk into another life,
where the first snow could enter
my skin, where the blue rag
thawing beneath the plum tree
would be the body I stepped out
of this evening. The stars
glow above the hayloft like
buttons from a serge dress,
like the dress I wore the day
the calf was stillborn,
the night the lightning tore open
the shed. I wake up constantly
to the sound of soft lowing,
to a clatter of shells
on the kitchen linoleum.
Two crows were killed
last week, chasing stars through
my window. I carried their
bodies from the slate roof
to the plum tree, burying
them under the frost. Their
thin legs seemed to point in
every direction. I have never felt
so lost as I did that morning.
For an hour I watched the water
pour into the sink
as if it were sky pouring out of
the faucet, or the blue cloth
a magician can pull from the fire,
as cold and silky as night.
Let me count the blue dresses
before sleep, anything to keep
from dreaming of the snow,
falling on my bed as if
it were a meadow where
two girls carry a silver
milk-pail and the thistles
tear at their hems.
Blue dresses, step into me
as if I were frost, as if
the clothes that live beyond us
were more like veins than rags.
And the headlights that sweep
across the walls this evening
were somehow necessary,
somehow needed, by the two girls
running on the far side of the meadow,
their dark feathers, their ancient light.