1. JANUARY
The red fox picks its way.
It roots in gullies
for a nesting vole, a field mouse
stranded by the freeze.
All night the attic teemed with mice
like unformed thoughts,
their small feet crumbling through a thousand pages
of the boxed-up books I’ve never read.
The children are asleep,
their shallow breaths the rise and fall
of generations, though I know that winter
will consume them, fix their thoughts
(like mine this morning) on the only end,
when what is passing has been passed,
unhoused at last.
I look up from my desk:
the glassy light is hard to see through,
slantwise, chill.
The old white house grows whiter still.
There’s silence in the sheets
that gather on my desk,
and I want to read somewhere of something
that is not this empty winter wait
for what will happen
in the wake of colder things to come.
2. FEBRUARY
A lace is spread
against the high black table of the night.
I’m walking in an orchard near my house
as stars detach and flutter into air.
The apple trees are bare,
but flakes are heaped like sugar on their limbs.
The roads are drifting deep with stars,
the ditches filling,
and the house dissolves—
the clapboards fading white on white.
In a blink, it’s gone:
the life I knew,
till sweeping winds invent a syntax
I may try to use
to re-create my house,
its soft, bright lines,
floor after floor, the stanzas
rising through a snowy gauze,
the chimney poking through a scrim
of powder into hard, black time.
3. MARCH
The sun is cold and yellow
on my study wall.
I nose among the books,
those written and unwritten,
dust of thought that clings or passes.
Love that’s come and gone
means less now,
though I wish I’d known when I was younger
that a simple phrase can last forever,
if it’s only true.
Beyond my window, in the snowy field,
the sun has found reflected glory
I could never match.
I let that light fall on my page.
The way of silence is a lasting way,
a darker way,
but not this month this mood this matter
that I waste my heart on,
web of words, this still-becoming
text that’s spun to catch whatever falls.
4. APRIL
The ice-floes shelve in alabaster streams,
and ground goes sodden underfoot.
Even the children start to turn,
their small tight fists becoming shovels
that can dig and dig.
My wife has changed her name again,
the letters on her skin,
as black-limbed hills begin to feed,
their long roots sucking.
There is just no end to what goes on.
5. MAY
Familiar tropings of a Spring Abstract:
the apple trees in bloom,
the house in gold, glad-handing light,
the garden path now fraught with bees.
Enough of that.
I put my face into the grass and breathe.
I root among the stones
and feel the singe of my own brightness,
light from light,
a speechless passage through a shimmer-time.
My project for the sun is more than words.
It involves this house,
now blazing whitely on the hill of noon.
It involves the bumblebee
that works its way from bloom to bloom.
It involves an urge to lift myself
beyond this frame,
beyond the difference of word and thing,
this pale Abstract,
the hackneyed rhythms we were born to sing
in Mary’s month, dum-derry-derry-ding.
6. JUNE
The house is in a flush of expectation.
For the uncut grass,
which deepens into noon.
For tiny swallows bunched in eaves
or dipping through the dusk.
For the pond that rises, fed invisibly
from streams below, its fringe of weeds
lashed to and fro.
And for the children:
long legs running on the minty world,
immaculate before their fall to mud,
their graceless tumble
on the trek to home.
7. JULY
Here is the spark of heaven,
rising on the Fourth, the spangled night
of firefall flakes, the glitzy stars.
I let the pond uphold my spirits,
drunk with day’s long exaltations,
floating on the raft of fellow-feeling
as the children swarm in rings around me
and the rockets spray.
The universe expands to fill my chest,
an outward crackle, ribs uncaged,
my bird-heart flown to God-knows-where.
The birth of freedom is my theme tonight,
the crack of rifles,
no more king, no taxes from abroad,
and each hand counts.
We’ll tax ourselves from here on out.
We’ll make ourselves the only kings.
We’ll feed the people on the bread of truth.
We’ll raise the children to believe for sure
that every color is divinely lit,
that every stone is God’s own flint,
that free means free
not only here but there as well,
wherever in the world the star-flakes fall,
the moon is swelling,
and the ponds fill up and go on filling.
8. AUGUST
Bounty, bounty.
And the children multiply and feed
like loaves and fishes.
and the crickets thrum in weedy corners
but are not a plague.
The corn is high above our heads
and spilling into ears, so ripe and sweet.
The garden tumbles with its plenty:
beans, potatoes, peppers, kale.
Improbably
we sit and talk of cities
where the streets are hard,
the sidewalks slept on by a thousand souls
in coinless, dreamless, lamplit wonder.
We condemn the nights where crack is king,
where guts are shredded for the smallest change,
where Programs fail,
where death has lost the power of troping.
Nothing in the world outside this text,
I want to say.
I want this text to hold, to cover
bodies on the street.
I want it for a net to catch what falls.
I want it, like a spider’s web, to shake
when any strand, oh anywhere, is touched.
9. SEPTEMBER
I saw it through a net of rain at dusk:
the field in fall,
its tearlike traceries against the pane.
The stones were sponges
left outside all night to drink,
the grass was sopping.
Leaves cut loose and flattened on the mud.
I could almost not believe the world
beyond those fields:
the God-abandoned gullies, cliffs of fear,
the deadhead swamps,
streams disappearing into deeper woods.
I put a log on,
watched it waken into flame.
I felt the warmth, the hiss to crackle,
fall to fire,
while somewhere overhead
the black geese flew, V after V,
a honking wedge of autumn knowledge
I would never have.
Their south was simile to me, no more;
their teleology was not my own.
I was here, and winterbound, and staying—
though the leaves went brown and visions failed
in traceries, in tears.
10. OCTOBER
Leafmeal, gild: the glory of a wood
too deep in dying to rehearse old times.
The tinsel days are full of flutter,
an advancing wind like military drums
before the slaughter of a billion lives.
We’ve come to die, but nobody complains
as bannerols are flown, as flags go snap.
The General is waving from his hill,
is mounted on his high, white horse of clouds.
There’s rock and drill, a draft of courage,
bugles like we’ve never heard before.
The death of dying is the only death
that matters, but it’s not within
our purview now; this loud, full battle
has our eyes, our ears in thrall;
we’re ankle-deep in all these corpses,
mulch and mangle, in the fell of fall.
11. NOVEMBER
The cellarhole is filled with dark,
the smell of apples rotting in a bin,
the stench of clay.
I sweep my hand through cobwebs streaming
from the joists and rafters
to adjust the settings on the furnace.
Old pipes hiss.
I climb the stairwell into light again,
a kitchen lit by lemons in a bowl,
by late November’s pooling light.
The children will be waking soon,
but I have time to squeeze the oranges
and pour the milk, remembering
the way my father rose without a clock,
and always dark. He’d stoke
the fire with chunks of coal,
then lay our boots out, pair by pair,
and stir the porridge over glass-blue flame.
These daily turns are what sustain me
through the passing days
as I ascend the spiral of each season,
reaching upward to the rosy light,
the only sun that can sustain me
in the world above,
beyond this rude vernacular that plays
for time, this temporizing phase,
beyond the circle of repeating days.
12. DECEMBER
The children have all left.
Their beds are empty, and the drawers hang out.
The bowls and spoons no longer chatter.
I have read the books along that shelf
beside the window.
Each of them is full of marginalia
I cannot decipher.
They will never help me through this day,
old books like friends too long abandoned.
It is not their fault that time must come.
A fire burns low, mid-afternoon;
the last log jolts to crumble in the grate,
with ashes on my tongue.
In winter woods, the fox is sleeping,
as I walk the fields to see if I can find
what can’t be found.
You’re not there standing in the husks of corn.
You’re not there floating in the black pond water.
Not a whisper in the whitest limbs,
the beautiful appalling grove of trees.
So late to question, but I must insist.
Who knows what happens to the little seeds
that fail to prosper?
Who knows if what is taken by the wind
will ever be returned?