Bearings
– for E
I love moments of half-dark before sunrise
as the year turns inward
the house with you asleep
and my hold rippling outward
to daughters in their places, sister,
brothers who began with me
drinking milk and running into the world
until night came with its Milky Way
*
and in the mountains six days ago
with my sister and one brother
I saw the Way again
and the Big Dipper on the horizon ready
to one day scoop us up
and I was—we were—shiny, and earth
turned beneath us, injured but just-then asleep,
dreaming Himalayas
*
and sometimes I know the other dark by
its scald in my throat, as when we just left
the hospital room where your brother lay, gauze
twisted high above his opened head,
a Trojan soldier crumpled after battle,
I murmured, go back in to him,
say good-bye before we leave—
and then you knew too and you did
From the Window at Dusk
I am not this silence
but in it I hear a strange cry
over and over. Below the window
I see a fox keening
I want to say— its cry
that of a child for its
lost mother. Then I see
a coyote pacing up and down
the lake shore at the end of the yard,
their movements parallel.
The fox the coyote might kill
deliberately draws its attention
but why? Is it distracting
the coyote from a den? What
rules that I don’t know apply?
Dusk is so lonely I’m lonely
in my deepest root.