Thoughts, Stalks
I see, maybe, the brief seep
of sunshine. The
world above
this roof opened and out
poured rain & her fast breathing
wind. It blew
drops beyond the window
sill and onto my almost waking
face. I’m sure I
heard it
all falling but I was in
a place I rarely am and
dreaming – how cliché
to say I thought it was all
happening
there and not in the actual
outdoors above and below me where just
yesterday I was gleaning the garden
of its duff of winter
of the sawn down silver
grass reeds, their ten-foot
thin stick selves so like those great
blue heron legs I watch stalk
the water below the falls
so confident, yes? and the patient way
they make of standing…
anyway these reeds, this cane
is a jumble of some
abandoned game
of pick-up-sticks, or the semblance
of last year’s life sliding
down onto the bodies of last
year’s life, their deadness
clean & hollow & almost weightless,
a hundred or more in this bundle
and tens more bundles
to be hauled to the edge
of the property line to be
broken still more, to be lit (when
all this water stops falling)
and to be fed into the fire – this is
impermanence at her lengthiest
suspension: the debris gathered
after the sky quiets again
and the like the gleaners who come
through to sift the seeds, & the feet
of the wheat stalks yet are stepped
on and left alone to decompose
as the season marches, probes
& sifts & spears & grows tall.
