draft: part one of a poem not yet finished.

bare trees, the acreage, october 2008.

“your eyebrows will be tangled up with the ancestors, you’ll see with the same eyes and hear with the same ears. won’t that be wonderful?” – wu-men, on solving a zen koan.

i)

out in the fields, you looked
for the last time. travelling blurs
sharpened, & you saw only

the threshed hills rolling
into the silent black hearth
of the earth.

autumn passed, the geese
flew low; your shaky hands
followed their paths,

instinctual embroideries,
left piles of pillow-down
woven with snow.

then one day you slipped
away with the owl’s glide, &
slid like the fallen aspen-spine,

into the fallow of the field.
you fell asleep, fox with a
brushtail curled in shelter,

a soul gone bone-white
& blown clean
for dreaming.