Field music

The dead are playing their pianos
in the circus ring of trees.
 

It’s midnight, and the moth burns,
then starts out on new, dark wings.
 

It’s best here to drink from the river
where the music leads.
 

Its water is a soft breathing emerald,
a fire under glass.
 

It might be the home of all our molecules,
the reason why something reaches out
 

when the rain arrives.
Its gravity is secret and colossal,
 

bends us into a chorus,
refracted voices emerging
 

from every porous joint,
every wild fissure.

It causes even the small darkness
of our pupils to shine like winter stones.
 

the blue hour

 

Dusk comes to me
with all her baskets,
singing.
I follow her through
the stages of night,
the degrees of darkness.
Awareness at this hour
has a purple tinge,
and all our obsessions
are exhausted.
The breeze undoes
the stolid points,
opening pools
where a feather sets down
and doesn’t vanish.
It will drift there forever,
like the light that fell long ago
across the shale roof
and still illuminates
the inner face of memory.
I come out of the forest
and almost believe there
really is a ghost inside my body.
It’s just a name, though,
tied to a persistent illusion
formed in the crucible
of the moon and trees.