A woman walking alone through the outskirts
of some small town, I don’t know what daybreak it is –
carrying herself and some moon of sadness slowly
toward open fields
There are landscapes that ache under birds’ wings,
irreducible, not filled by a wind’s length.
Magnolias soft as an eyelash, Indianapolis spills
over the plain
Fields and farms, great barns under those rooves
of a settling wing, the eye drifts on the same images,
the land cut so, stamped to familiars, each thing
I imagine the water-towers growing, tiny and bulbous
out of the soil of some distant farm, row after row.
Aloud I think, Love we are shaped in our acts, in our words
for each other
The roads lie straight as a look. This way three hunters
cross tracks where trains hoot in the loneliness,
walking loose-limbed and apart into thin woods,
into grey light