WOODS WALKER

You ice-crack your way
to that clearing, you
and Holly, coming again
to the horses. They stand
and paw, venting breath
through their nostrils,
ghost blossoms
on a winter tree. Some
days they watch you from
far back where panels
are set up for shelter
from the resolute wind.
They wish you’d
leave them to stare off
steady without explaining.
Other days they meet you
at the rail fence, big
upper lips raised expectantly
in their horse smiles.
When you start out,
setting the lock, letting
your storm door soosh
closed, you don’t know
if they’ll be private that day.
Or they may let you rub
your glove on their noses as
they bite real and transparent
carrots all the while.
Whichever their mood
they never make you wonder
if you’ve oversold yourself.

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PARTIAL MEMORY

Night, leaves layered
in black puddles, the rain
driving down more —
catalpa, maple, hickory,
elm — I think elms
were still around. But I can’t
find in my view of that night
why I am waiting alone
as you, under your umbrella,
move unnoticed toward me.
You must be shimmering
like all else around.
And somehow you know
to search for me through the rain
after singing at the service.
Your fingers startle me,
tapping my spotted
steamy window,
which I lower
so our warmths can meet.
Quick water drops leap in.
With visible breath
you give me words
anyone would want,
no one could confuse.
I see myself sitting silent.
You turn. You step
away among flat, wet leaves
and grow small beneath the trees.
Drops on my window
pass you along,
one to another.
They split you into blue, gray
and green. Until you
become the night.

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FAR FROM CANADA NEAR SUNSET

I’m not in a Vancouver restaurant
out of the rain, nor in Ottawa
where tulips stand along the Rideau.
I’m not in Maniwaki Quebec
at Hubert’s general store
with winter parkas on sale
down the aisle from bass lures
and iron plates. I haven’t gone
to Tijuana, across the other line,
where scraggly kids and women
wait with shell bracelets
for a gringo to offer a dollar.
Tonight, rash men will play
a chancy game of Red Rover
Come Over against a team wearing
advantage goggles and guns.
I wonder about the land
of immigrants I live in
where questions linger.
Were NY hospitals for whites
slow to take in Billie Holiday
in her last desperate hours?
Did borders exist, defended heavily,
that even Lady Day couldn’t get over?
I sit in an empty park, the sun falling
behind old eucalyptus trees, the moon
waiting in the east to dominate
the sky. I look around and see
I’m right in the middle of things.

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CAMERA OBSCURA

Who hasn’t poked a pinhole in the end
of a black box? You can magically make
reverse, up-side-down images of
chestnut trees, dangling their
spiky prizes toward the sky,
make the cardinal feather
on the left of Aunt Melba’s braided hat
appear instead on the right.
Some brave Halloween
black out all your front windows, leave
a hole, and you can plop your
neighbor’s house on your couch,
with his tended garden spread across
your floor, walls and ceiling.
You’ll see his prized salmon
roses leaping wrong-side up
over your furniture. Step outside,
get in the picture, and your favorite chair
will receive you, topsy-turvy. Your pockets
will look ready to yield your keys and
the note you wrote this morning
to pick up your laundry.
Secret thoughts you’ve harbored about Angela,
whose raven hair turns you dumb
each time you walk by the
bookstore where she works,
will seem pried loose, about to spill at
last from your mouth
as it hangs on your wall
wrong side up.

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NOT EVEN SPEAKING LANGUAGE

She says she imagines her skull,
bright and durable, mounted
on the mantel. By the light
of old lanterns I take comfort
in talk with this sweet-smelling
woman, her good dog, and shared
crusts of currant bread.
She says she’s past religion
but still believes in the way
most creatures are born.
I laugh when she admits
feeling old as cathode-ray tubes.
In her eyes I find evidence
she’ll always be beautiful. Above
blackish-brown trees a plane circles
but I say I’ve got time contained
in a small boat at sea
and can only hear far-off rumors.
Now she laughs when I trace
erotic inscriptions left somehow
on our empty glasses.
And I slide between sheets
to see if light will bend
around this woman’s body.

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