DAY'S END IN THE SHENANDOAH

We take the northernmost trail—
rock-ridden and deep red, and marked
by blue paint-blazes on the trees,
bright bursts amid the green.

At its end, a low cabin, splashed
with graffiti. And inside, too,
words everywhere—miniature
ballpoint-pen diatribes, and expletives,
and the record book hanging on a nail,
brittle and teeming with little histories.

Sitting on the rough floor, looking out—
down the hill to the river blackened
by raincloud-reflection, and down to the sharp
gray ridge beyond, like a raised hand—
we can see the slow approach
of the dark between us,
the sort of stifling that is a subtle thing,
still mixed-through with calmness,
like a sound mixes with the air.

ON THE CAPE

Where water stretches the land into a thin line,
we walk the night streets
until solid turns to sand,
and we feel the push of the salt air
and the pull of the cold, formless black.
On either side there is nothing but the sea,
and we are standing on that light narrowness,
breathing, trying to breathe,
each so tightly wrapped by the wind,
we seem alone.


TO THE SALAMANDER POND

Even then, on the sponge-like afternoon
when the wet earth sprang back underneath us,
you were beginning to fear me, as one fears
a spirit in the next room,
with as much curiosity as dread.
Yet you kept your hand around my wrist, tight,
with a grip that surfaced veins.

The road to you was always this—
the gray line of a bird's tail,
uneven, stretched like the shore of a shoal.
And you were always the most insidious
of enemies, ankle-deep in the still pond,
glancing back at me with eyes as black as newts’,
simmering and young.


THE SENSE OF SOMETHING WAITING

The space between the trees swirled with seawater,
and when the wind ran along the branches, they floated,
moved by a force both solid and insolid.

And through the chilled air,
the insect-sounds became the calls of parrots—
bright, flying flecks of greener green among the leaves.

The forest curved inward like a clasp,
drew itself out like a deep, wide wound,
and retracted, weighed-down and still.


THE APPEARANCE

On an autumn early-evening
muffled by a mustard haze,
I walked the pebble line
on the city's western edge,
which looks on the map,
like a green and brown
terraced, thick expanse;
on foot it is a tangle
of overgrown paths
and the deep coils of tire-tracks.

You must have been there,
inhabiting the moss-patches
and the heaviness of the air
and the pungent, rain-saturated stumps,
because when I spoke to you,
I could hear your footsteps,
staccato-light,
snapping the undergrowth in front of me.


INTERPRETATION OF A MURDER

In the dream where I strangle you,
we barely touch.
There is no chase, no confrontation,
just breath, faceless and familiar.

How commonplace your death is—
an action entered into without struggle,
without the chest-heat of angered exhilaration.
I put my hands on you as though we’ve never met.
Your skin’s the skin of a stranger's.


ABOVE-GROUND

At my head, the twisted chalk-red plant
that smells of cinnamon.
At my feet, the bright-leafed fern,
golden green, and thin as wet paper.
And the sound of dripping water
all around, like a voice.

In the damp, hard space, clouded
from within by plant-breath,
the glass becomes like soil,
but louder, wider;
metal grates beside me on the floor,
two blue-black orchids,
and the inside-locked door.


THE BURDEN

Everything steered itself toward combination.
At the table—feeble legs abraded,
vaguely bent—in the early blue,
he felt even the smallness
of the room heaving inward,
dishes falling like the bodies
of flightless birds onto the footprint-
mashed floor mat, falling with everything
else that was superfluous—
refrigerator magnets, pans, the contents
of the garbage can—and colliding
against him, his eyes shut, his
un-slippered feet bare on the cold linoleum.

And the hum that had arisen in the room,
that had set it whirring with a low, constant resonance,
was either the sound of an enemy, or of nothing.


IMAGINE SEAHORSES

An ugliness shook itself inside the room,
pushed its elbows hard against the walls
with a sulfuric stench,
like the low cloud from a factory smokestack.

Within it all, silent in the crush
of the too-loud music and motion
that the mirrored wall reflected off itself,
sitting on a stained green-velvet cushion
with a wet beer bottle creasing the palm of his hand,
he made his mind imagine seahorses—
the bright, curved shapes that hovered
in his father's old fish tank, uncannily small,
detailed, naked as the color white.


THE WRECKAGE

Your system of rules fell down
on the day that the waterlogged
branches of a wind-smashed sycamore
pierced your basement window, coating
the floor with three inches of stagnation
scattered with dark red leaf-boats
and with a bottom layer of glass.

Surveying it all, sloshing sandal-footed
to the sunlit half of the room, you began
to see that structure formed for the sake of structure
is baseless, as easily adhered-to as it is destructible,
and with the ability to split you
when its compartments collapse inward.

I've never understood these boundaries
you impose upon yourself, my friend.
From every analysis, they sag
like tree branches crashing into houses.


NIGHT COFFEE

In a way it smells like earth,
a deep odor trapping itself
in the space by the bookshelf
like soil piled in a corner,
an avant-garde art piece
into which visitors
are invited to place their hands.


SLEEPWALKING

As a boy, he would swing his nightshirted
body over the fence—feet bare
and eyes filmy, flat as concrete—
sensing the secretiveness of it all
and the fear that would infiltrate his mother
when she woke in the red August heat,
finding him gone.

The city was all sounds and smells at night—
streetcars shaking it in a fury,
the drift of burn-odor from the factories
that lined the harbor,
and the hollowness of foghorns.

He would move along the side-streets to its center,
pausing in the vast cargo-ship silhouettes,
face turned toward the water, until the dockworkers
began to arrive and a creeping blueness
swelled low across the sky.

Small and silent, he mapped it all this way,
remembering the turns and rises and fannings-out
of the roads, and coming back
to his brightening bed, its blankets twisted,
somehow calmer, somehow knowing
the routes, the patterns,
that he did not know awake.


THE SAW

The gray Catoctin curls in like a fist,
the thumb beneath into the palm, and white
fingernail-cliffs and crevices against
its underside, a black-green swatch of pines.

In May, I take the trail that curves out east,
its northward rise segmented by a stream,
and keep my eyes affixed upon the ground
to pick up items usually stepped-upon—
the pine cones, sharp, pockmarked by catacombs,
the fallen bark, pressed hard into the dirt,
and wet embedded leaves, spread out like hands.
The air is thin and light against my legs.

Below the backyard maple, squat and pruned,
you'd read me The Sand County Almanac,
and lingered on the chapter on oak-rings—
the years cut into, decades pulled apart,
their darkened circles opened to the sun.

The trail here on the mountain spirals out
and winds up to the flat and vacant peak:
a wide, fresh-severed oak, chafed on its rim.


IN THE SUBURBAN TREEHOUSE

Curled like the sphere of a worm,
too big for the space, I can't help
but run my hand along the underside
of the roof, with its rough wood
and stalactite nails, askew.

From above, the houses are red
ice cubes in a tray, frozen Kool-Aid
megaliths with dark asphalt driveways—
crumpled stone framed by the luster of greenness.
And everything plastic,
right down to the molecules.

But there's a scent of bark high
in the crevices of the ceiling,
and bits of light that point
downward from the rotted-out rain-holes,
and past the voices and the motors of the plastic streets,
a wide sky beyond.


HIGH SCHOOL CAFETERIA, AGE 25

After the reunion—wide blank eyes
on fattening faces pushpinned with pearls,
and pink, pink seersucker everywhere—
we sit on the lettuce-dotted floor
behind the sandwich area, pressing the cork
of our five-dollar wine bottle downward
with the nub of a travel toothbrush.

This was precisely where, at a tenth-grade
Halloween dance, I flirted, lengthily,
with someone's smallish boyfriend, bemused
by the nibbling motions his mouth made
when he spoke, and dangling my legs
over the counter swathed in orange crepe-paper.

Away from the influx of conversation
and the large-spooned smack of potato salad
to plate, we hide—raising the red bottle
to the time when things were absurd
and tidily compacted.


SWIMMING

Move yourself away from the memories of me—
smooth as the gliding of a foot into silt,
and dawn-pale impermanent—and walk
down the gray-carpeted stairs to the street,
loud with the pops of car tires on cobblestones,
and down to the east side of the river,
with its wide bridge looming too close,
darkening the water.

Dangle down your hands, palm-up,
and release me through your fingers—
I will send myself southward with the current
while the remnants of it all drop to the bottom.


SOUNDS FROM A BRICK HOUSE

On the porch, the teakwood chairs bent in like skeletons,
their bleached-out paleness shiny in the winter light.
And in the wide room with the pink silk peonies placed at is center,
she opened the propped music book and cradled her violin,
like a child cradling a blanket,
while he watched her through the glass door.

The sound rose vague and distant past the door;
it chattered softly like the buried bones of skeletons,
frenetically rising, then fading as if covered with a blanket,
and with each movement of her arm the light
prodded and groped against the shape of the violin
and fell into the black round hole at the center.

All seemed sterile and suspended at the center
of the house—no speech beyond the door,
no one to feel the murmurings of the violin,
but only a rigid roomful of furniture-skeletons,
tinted slightly by the afternoon light,
and he, outside, coat dangling from his shoulders like a blanket.

And the air around them, rain-heavy, was a blanket,
bright, bright, and folding them into its center
with all that was touched by the wet light,
collapsed-in, and tight as the slammed door
of a crypt encasing skeletons.
She turned her head up and placed the violin

On the chair, knowing the violin
was all that kept him loving her, and that beneath the blanket
of calm they had created now lay their skeletons—
a thing they could not salvage or re-center,
a tightening space with neither windows nor a door,
pressed-in upon itself, devoid of light.

From the porch there came a shard of light
as glass slid over glass, and the violin
reflected the white rectangle of the open door.
He wound his arm around her like a long blanket,
and they stood as motionless as skeletons
in the cold wide room's center.

She wanted to untangle from his arm and blanket
the house with the noise of the violin.
Outside, the porch-fenceposts glowed white as skeletons.


JULY

Past the gray wooden dock—
termite-chewed and collapsing
from within, with splinters
like the tiny beaks of birds—
where the tide runs forward
and encircles the half-hidden
stones individually, shining them with water,
and past the fishing pier that moves with the water,
we went shoeless to the sandbank,
surrounded to the tops of our legs,
and being swayed.

The air pushed down, loud,
and after it, a bright silence widened,
glowing like the yellow boat-light across the inlet.


THE TURN

From within, a blind impatience rose up
like white-green moss over the mouth of a well.
It crept into the order of my days
and spread itself out among the tight spaces
between the leaf-umbrellas and the sky,
between the fog clouds that drift along the ground,
between my feet and the root-black earth.

And through it, the world became raw and unfinished,
animated by a murmuring sense of unease
that pushed open doors and edged books off their shelves,
and made the wind collide from two directions
while I walked along the stone-scattered sand,
arms pulled into my jacket sleeves, head up
in the moving air, vaguely comfortable
and waiting.

The things that form us and inform us do not change.
The calm that seems more present in its absence
appears, shifts, and evades.


BEGIN TO HOPE

Begin to hope
if when you place your hand around
a glass of sun-warmed water and look
up—not at the tabletops crowded
with lunch-stained plastic plates,
not at the shifting street-shapes, fast
and blurred in the heat, not at the wet
blank sky, not at the face
across from you, damp as your own,
but at the eyes themselves—you
can see a brightness that is colorless,
not bound to the blue, but reaching
toward you in rays, rays like a sunburst.