Country Gospel
Crow alone
on the only dead
river birch
in a young stand.
The sun, of course,
undoes the blackness
of the bird’s
packed feathers
when it leaves
the tree. Its wings
re-cross the air
around the body
they lift to the sky,
and every color
we know boils
out of their backs.
Our day is half-over,
the light stranger.
Everyone will be
happy over there,
they say, where
the crows will still
be black. At least,
I hope there are
crows. Does heaven
have harbingers?
Is there a place in light
for what it lacks?
Country Gospel
Light snow today,
the lightest you can
imagine. Just a skiff
of color-shift
on the froze-up ground.
Around our heads
when we stood up
from work that had
us bending down
was flurry static
and in our heads
dynamic blood
rushing as it does
to where it goes.
At times it seemed
I’d lost a compass
I almost always
have at hand—
the one that tells
me where to look
to find the center
my eyes require,
one that parses
out the grey music
of basic winter,
what divides the mind
from the sky and gives
us a place to stand.
Country Gospel
Frost was right
about the sound
of trees. Also,
they are the ocean
for interior places
like these (without roads
too near, I should add,
which partly was
his point—all that
hawing about leaving
or staying still).
What they will do
is mostly clear.
One thing they seem
to do is steer
the meadow further on
into the west,
but I know illusion
when I see it.
No one is driving
this thing for real.
We wail in wind
and wonder who
or what will hear
the shiver-shift
of our branches, I mean
our hands, stretched out
above the field.
