* * *

(* * *)

The graveyard where we spent some idle moments

watching the ways the mid-day clouds sculpted

themselves from nothing, heavy-loaded,

luxuriantly, keeping edges scalloped –

that place was home to a sound inchoate:

music perhaps, or ‘drink-drink-drink’ birdcall,

and in the air, trembling and glowing,

hung a thread, almost ethereal.

Now what was that? The hawthorn whisper?

Or was it squaw Indian summer worming

between the paws of the spruces?

Or was it only the babble of those old women,

one with a measure, one spinning but declining

to weave, the third with shears? Maybe the Connecticut

gossiping towards the Atlantic,

and the grass sighing ‘Forget me not’.

5 May 1996, Eugene