Ah, to be a painter
with his mimetic limbs.
A painter extrapolates the frame.

Or a jazz musician
with his improvisation.
Gone beyond rhythm.

Struggling with the hard work
of language, that direct conduit
to the soul of a man.

*

Faint pleasure of dissonance,
like winter.
Abundance can weigh so much.

Pleasure not in metered stasis,
but resident in the breaths
after the shattering.

*

Fields of memory.
That boundless, unruly
expansion. No copse of pines,

no precipice, no stream.
The flat, fecund earth.
Ever on, ever on.

*

The mother poet,
her backyard. A verse of
roses, a verse of boy legs,

a verse of girl legs.
Sun sewn faces,
lyrical feet, hands.

Loveliness can suffice
in the shadow of genocide,
of squalor, of war,

she thinks. Their fine
strokes of motion,
streaking out of frame.

*

At the edge of my poem,
a woman is trying to
follow her children

as they scramble toward
that mottled threshold
beyond which they name themselves.

A painter is trying
to render the sclerotic shivers
the pines send up

in the storm
which has not yet arrived.
(is it true? can you smell the

coming rain?) And inside
the pines, the boys are
plumbing deep into

the demarcated, tender
wetness of the girls.
Moaning in improvised,

exploratory crescendos.
Does anyone emerge changed?
Everyone gasping.

*

Dusk extrapolates
the children in bed,
dreaming.

The painter sleeps,
the jazz man sleeps.

The mother sips coffee
and writes lines on
the sacred, its relativity.

The pines, dark matter,
numinous under moon.