You believed they would return, years on. People — their pressure
and presence — would seek you out through the grain of some
Wednesday’s
gravid weather, find you busy but pensive, muttering into a green
duffle pregnant with laundry. By letter, long flight, or their own
secondhand hatchback, you kept in mind their returning, their slip
and latch into a clean socket, one of the waited-on parts
to the engine you’d made your life into. You pictured their peaceful
return and revival as if lives were like fads or seasons and gained
something precious through years of neglect: an intimate, sayable
knowledge of the planed-down, weathered oak plank that is your soul
from their perspective. Between them and you grew up highways, silos,
bad decisions, holidays, forest fires, firings and quittings: you thought
these a safe buffer, believing they would return. Family, fissured
and dissolved decades past, and irreplaceable friends whose love
you hadn’t the mettle to stand foursquare and tend to. You
pictured a time when trees, brickwork, bridges had settled, finally,
into the somehow holy, into the intricate, star-sewn fabric
of themselves that had until now always hung rucked, a torque
at the seams, gathered, pinched as though each thing on earth were
some agitated angel in the weather’s ill will. A time when your own
courage to act,
to set right the flaws, would flow coterminous to their blood’s
unease at absence. You’ll have acquired, by attrition, these vitals
of spirit
during a stripped-down sojourn in Glasgow, Nepal, or Berlin,
you’ll have
grown porous, a beggar, cored as you are now by this kestrel’s keen
wing-stab in takeoff — an algebra’d beauty that travels via
the budding,
x-rayed lung of a maple splayed out before you, spreading its
dark lace
work of shadow like vipers on the lawn the lawn will swallow —