poem out for fresh air + song...

{elm branches & cloud, just outside my house, jan. 16th/07}

"And all that we built,
and all that we breathed,
and all that we spilt, or pulled up like weeds
is piled up in back;
it burns irrevocably.
(we spoke up in turns,
'till the silence crept over me)"

-- Joanna Newsom, 'Sadie' (mp3)

* * *

(first draft of a poem i'm in the midst of working on, that wanted to get some fresh air...)

we are driving down the highway south
& i am knitting away at my thoughts,
a quiet clicking & you are listening
to your meditation tapes, a man’s voice
deep like thrown stones but in the pools
between his words i can hear you almost cry –

what to say? i watch the trees running
beside us, stark winter architecture all
aching joints & crooked capillaries, nothing
hiding the lacy needle-scars & age-spots, in
the peeling bark of black birches i can map out
the revealed relief of your heart –

i know that everything is a little too close now,
for you all those dark objects in the mirror
closer than they appear. & i have never
felt dying any closer than the shadow
of highway crosses, the terrible origami
of a deer’s body, a roadkill feast for the crows –

but here, driving over the plains i watch
you gaze over the rolling ice of the coulees,
the slow rise of the foothills following your eye
& though you are right here beside me you
are already much closer than i to that place
where the hills become luminous snowdrifts

of mountains, the place where the horizon
turns into the sleeping light of the sun –

* * *