for L.G.

In blue wind-rivered, the sky stretches,
a cloud-patched cat,

the day moon a dry gem rising
over the field, a morning to leave

my grief dwelling, climb the hill to the pond
or climb the wind, its touch as light

as the fingers of a night shaken
with stars, rattle of branches at the stream

you live by, Friend, where my letters arrive,
the dark talking into winter,

the winter a door, loss that stays ajar.
If we count on comfort

in stones, markers, monuments,
what homes have we made?

 

********

 

After the nest fell—wispy
and rounded robin-smooth inside,

nest light in my hands, no bits of shell,
no yolk stain of catastrophe,

just a bowl, grass and mud
drying toward dust, that I carried

to the back yard—I moved
into the next day, and the next,

the season slipping past.
The nest unraveled. What was left—

a single thread winding blue,
having held it all together awhile.

Build on the past with a prayer
that what I construct will not tear me apart.

 

********

 

I scatter words across another year to you,
words like leaves drifting before

the cold stiffens. What tethers me,
keeps me writing these letters?

I thought, at first, it was the deaths.
Then the shock that, after ragged months,

we kept walking around, lugging our bags
of wounds, ruins like sacks of rocks.

Let the stones we carry
be rubbed smooth, pain’s layers

pressed by time to become, finally,
something we can set down,

our grief buried under water
running, some blue and blue.