of the age it seemed that the long days setting out
when the stars faded over the mountains were not
leaving us even as the birds woke in full song ..." – Merwin, "The Speed of Light"
Even as the Birds Woke
We would have to go back a ways to cover our tracks
of the dreams of moments that included the nothing
of every last thing of any trail or sky or pond or wintering
bird that you might not recognize a mere pattern of dicibals
reaching away from the open limbs not as a chorus
but of course more primitive a blot back there against
the wide open months of the treacherous season that takes
and wills you away from yourself where the prairie
made more sense than the tasks of gain when the words
we too spilled in under marshland canopy across
a boardwalk had the weight of tufts of dark flowers
to give and receive eyes as rocks gleaming mouths
as organs still alive to the air and our own sounds crunching
purposefully across thin sheens of ice where time always
sides with the long stretched torrent of life in winter months
wake to your birds like hearts that can predict the sun
