I walked with my traveler through several infinities
beside the estero
under the gray sun. Always the fox
sparrows lifting autumn through their bodies. Crows
in their judge robes flew overhead
and the dirt shone
our laughs were tied together,
the milky white birdshit with the purple tinge of
—(they had been eating berries)—heaped up
around the owls’ clover.
And I loved my traveler but I feared his completeness,
the way everything kept
, taking him in. And everything took me in
because I was beside him. One ragged
cypress leaning sideways, as it did.
Even the lightning struck, the previously glorious.
Even the stumps of the oak were receiving of us, then.
—Old Mr. Black-beetle crossing the trail
where is your mate you shiny thing
But for my part I noticed everything was split
(because of the divorce or the fault line probably)
Even two colors of gray in the granite.
Each set of needles in the bishop pine
short deliberate pairs
thrust from the papery wrappings at the end,
no pair wanting to be just one needle,
both halves wanting to be separate;
and the hemlock at this time in summer
has this separate, sort of dry interior,
like styrofoam.
Makes it rattle, almost.
But, there is no way to tell you how beautiful he was,
climbing the dry hill,
holding the unplanned bouquet of the several dying grasses
which had come to him„ of course, so willingly—
wild wheat wild rye wild barley
Each with its split dialectical seed
(split but not divorced, split but orderly)
he held with his sexual hand those agreeable grasses
—seeds falling off them,
the ambassador of outside, the source of gladness—
and the meadows hurried brown,
the greatly unstressed fields turned middle-aged and handsome,
not wanting to be themselves anymore;
the grasses wanted to be just like him.
O.K. but.
How to walk beside another person,
was what was wrong with me.
(Or, not wrong exactly.
Just like the women of my era.)
Birds of the estero could walk beside.
Greater yellowlegs stepped goldenly
beside the willet.
Could could (could) Could. Goldenly
toward the one gleaming trout.
Surely the willet could manage on its own,
two dark wing smudges holding it up
(could, could, could) The briefly
seen. My love stood beside;
I watched him plain who watched a flock of
(according to him) sandpipers
turn together 4 ways, like a box
—gray white black nothing—
they turned together 4 ways
like a box mailed out to sea
I felt the split in nature mend
not because I learned, the split learned;
I tried to cross to count his otherness
and when I couldn’t count
it counted,
that bright love counted me—