Magnolia

photo by
James Aubright

The Winds

And so they collected those skittish winds that blow
between darkness and first light. They lassoed whatever
allowed the wind to move, and they tied it with a slipknot,
and the wind stood there waiting like a tree or a bale of hay,
and it didn’t even try to struggle; it just stood there as other winds
began to grow restless, winds that usually
slept until daylight, winds that slip down
before rain, winds we call Son-and-Daughter, Memory,
and send off to school like some failure of imagination
to see how they will do there, who else they might become.
And when they’d collected enough wind for everyone,
after many mornings of austerity and work,
they dug holes to plant the wind—or tried to—in the fields
where their ancestors were buried, and some of those winds
understood what was required and stood perfectly still
until they were the farmland and orchards that make
this region so fertile. But the others, their brothers
and sisters, were not so docile: After all, they whispered,
these people had trapped them and tied them in bundles
without the least concern for their pride or imagination,
or for their fragile bones—
and so they decided to seem human for a while
until they could blow things apart from within,
and they started to move like nothing with a vengeance,
driving cars and building houses. On, and on, and on.

This Time

I can’t remember any animals to mean
what I need to say. I can’t find any birds.
And I can’t think of the best trees to think through, either,
except maybe live oaks, since they grow here without
anyone planting them. I can’t imagine bodies
of water, or of clouds. I can’t find what I mean
in furniture or books, windows, lamps or mirrors.
My body says nothing, and neither does yours,
my love. My face is just bones. And although
your face is still beautiful, like a language that’s complete
in itself, it’s not enough either
to say what I need to. So the bees will have to
suffice, the honey bees which have been vanishing
so suddenly, the honey bees whose buzzing is a species
of silence, the silence of trying to think
in a crowd, or of trying to think in a crowd
of animals and trees whose names we don’t know
and meet for our whole life as strangers.

The Precious Stones

The breeze has braided the grasses like hair
and now it’s unraveling the seeds into the woods
by the creek, where they’ll lie until something eats them
or they start to grow. The grasses, at least some of them,
will stay braided through the winter. They’ll lie braided under snow.
No one will remember them, but we will know they’re there
because we were silent, looking out across that field.
Because we watched a coyote, head low, stalking black birds,
crows or ravens. For years, I lived alone
in basements without windows. I can hardly tell the truth
about basements like that, without thinking of snow
or remembering sleeping for days in perfect darkness
when a blizzard buried everything, cutting out the lights
and alarm clock. And the dark would never have surrendered
down there. It would have curled up within its own weight
the way people are sometimes changed into precious stones
and thus considered valuable, and polished to a gleam
that sparks up when the light shines upon them.

 Even Sleeping

I hug my love’s body in the warm night in sleep
and we sweat together, while outside some bird
calls out like singing. We hear it, even
sleeping, and it changes the shape of our dreams.
We both believe in animals no one has named.
Standing in a slow-moving elevator up
a stranger tells me he was swimming just beyond
the waves and sand bars when a huge fish
or even a whale swam by, its body
brushing his legs. Then we step off together
and go our separate ways. And many years ago,
when my children were small, a mockingbird flew
into the elevator I was riding in alone.
It flew against the wall, stunned itself, and fell
to the floor, so I cupped it in my hands and walked
from office to office asking for a window
that would open so I could put it on the sill there
until it came to and could fly. But those windows
don’t open, so I finally carried it outside
and set it gently down in the root-crotch of a tree
and went back to work. I love the way those birds sing
in other birds’ voices and even with the cries
of barking and our human sounds. The truest love is every day,
we understand that now, even sleeping.

The Rain

But there are yellow birds singing in the oak trees,
and there are birds flying above us, always,
which need to be watched. And the landscapes inside us,
beyond ourselves, are like the lives we have forgotten
and full of creatures we have never seen, who talk when we do
and dream we are doing what we’re doing right now.
Just last night I imagined I was lying in my garden
on top of the grass--floating there--while it rained
hard enough to blur my eyes. All around my body
mushrooms were pushing up. I imagined they were groaning,
and I hoped someone would come along to gather them and find me.
I realized my wife was sleeping in the house
beside the other sleeping me, so I let myself just melt away
into the ground--the way people I’ve loved
have simply melted, right before my eyes--
and I wondered as I lay there what it would feel like 
to move underground, like the water.

painting by
Michele Wirt

The Musician

The man in our basement practices guitar
all day while his family is off to work and school.
I listen to him running his complicated scales,
practicing dissonance, chord changes, nuanced
voicings. Sometimes he sings, when he thinks
I’m not home, in a high-pitched yowl
that scares me, to be honest, since the desperation
quivering behind that sound reminds me
of everything I haven’t done yet and probably
never will now; it reminds me of my hair
and skin, of my eyes and desires.
So I get up and walk around loudly until he hears me
and takes a break. We meet outside
to circle the block a few times, talking
of Bach and Bud Powell, dreams and Ravi Shankar--
and soon we are singing to each other, my friend
and I, and before long our families have returned
from wherever they’d gone off to, our children and wives,
brimming with news of their days, asking us
how our work went. I can hear my friend
in the basement now, talking about the cases he tried,
the judges he faced. So by the time
I pick up my guitar to demonstrate the ideas
I worked on today, my wife has started crying,
dinner has been burned, the children are crabby,
and my fingers feel heavy with silence.

The Bull Frogs

This is how clueless we were when we first
moved here from Vermont and couldn’t shake the cold
for an entire year: so clueless that every time
we went into the Everglades, every time we waded
off the road there we just had to take off our clothes
for a swim in the black water, rejoicing at how far
we’d traveled from Vermont to this warmth, and we’d delight
in what we called the bullfrogs as we swam out,
their croaks, so resonant in the quiet Everglades,
and we reveled at the sweet smells and balmy breezes
as we floated on our backs to watch the buzzards circle
and marveled at the fact that so few people
came out here to swim: The water smelled like flowers.
We had no idea that those croaks we found so charming
were challenges from bull alligators establishing their territory,
calling anything in the immediate vicinity
to make love or fight, and they were hungry too.
We just swam out, naked, happy to be alive.
And then we got dressed and drove home through the dusk
along a two-lane highway that was littered with the bodies
of wild creatures hit by cars: vultures and opossums,
turtles, snakes, raccoons. We hardly talked
as we drove: Sometimes you looked out the window
at the darkness. More often you fell asleep beside me.