If it began from above, for everyone, with swatches
of green
and green and brown, then the green could become field
and forest and the brown the kind of farm you could
step inside. Every space
has an inaudible signature, and if you pop a balloon
or clap a hand you’ll hear it in the instant after.
This is how you listen
for home. Music encoded onto cassette tapes
that powders off as you play it is music decomposing,
like the decades
and decades of whale remains that were left in the harbor
and broke many men with their scale. A life will arrange
around terrible acts
or tenderness and feelings have something real inside them
that enters your marrow, an event Aristotle would have
called motion:
a child growing, a tree
coming into flower, a thought unfolding across a face. My love
tried to save the broken apricot limb whose syrupy wells
had brought
blossoms and now lay
laden with them in the grass. He wants to save everything he loves
with an ardor as old and stainless as his boyhood. These feelings!
And the feel
of his hair against my fingertips and the way when I was pregnant
my grandfather came to me in a dream and held my hand with
his calloused fingers
to remind me I had not, in fact, crawled from a crack in the earth
but belonged here as much as the script sunbaked into the slab
belongs to the clay.
The maple trees have grown taller than our house. The branches
bisect the trunk and this equals tree. Might the source
of the starlight
we see, which is billions of years old, be gone
by now? Yes. But my love and I, we are in the middle
of our lives,
and light come to us from all directions.
lovely