Apple Pine Mountain
At four, near dawn, resident with trees, a
mountain’s
wind song, a moon that clashed with clouds perky
as lambs, friends loving behind me though six feet
apart at times, I pissed off the wide porch down into
the unknown, that good talking beer talking good
again, crisply, this way and that, on the quick glass
of leaves. The sound stole, even for a moment, all
the moon and the cool threat of snow.
But at the last shattering of a leaf, at the end of beer
talk, I was the aggregate of selves knowing Apple
Pine Mountain, was constant and one, a kind of
uniform loneliness with stars punching down their
pneumatic cries, the million years of their dying
that one would hear their voices.
Oh, I heard, between trees and close shadow burst,
between the thrills of impulse, between molecules,
the significance of sound. Oh, I listened, my friends,
I listened and grew dizzy because I heard, from stars
by way of clouds, from loam by way of blade and leaf,
from every joint and joist of the cabin, after pissing
off the porch, love.
Four Parts of
Creature
1.
There’s a piece
of you hanging
like an old jacket
on an old nail
beside a job
I never finished.
2.
Twilight lashes us,
which always wasn’t this way,
this step in another direction.
Now my mouth
is against your wetness
and all you’ve shaken loose.
I hear you say
you have waited
forever for this talk of mine.
Never again
will I argue for the hours
we have lost getting here.
3.
Listen,
the mercury
is resolved.
Beneath
my hand the Earth
passes a quick shadow,
recollects
the distinction
of a breath.
A new feather
finds a warm wing
to grow from.
The cup
and the juice,
the Earth
and the seed,
are one.
The secret
is the grip,
by the finger-
nails if need be.
Mostly by
a corner
of the mind,
an edge
where a root strikes,
curls like
a rattler.
Sometime
the heart’s
enough.
Later,
past the next
tense of mind,
we will think
of now:
grass clearing
its throat,
ground cover
ripe of ballistics,
your hands
at introduction.
You will be
a poem,
a voice on a page,
a leaf rising
from the ashes
of a winter tree,
a sound from white
space.
If never comes
we shall never forget:
grass ripe,
you rich,
me urgent.
4.
I would have gone
except for your
saying at the last
moment how awful
apart would be like
discarding the apple
core Eve retrieved
to see if there was
one bite left.
Contributor:
Tom Sheehan
Comment on
these poems on our Message Boards
|