"So gradual in those summers was the going

    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