Can You with What is Beautiful
can you with what is beautiful make your peace
abiding this sunlight which rains down untroubled
by any atmosphere of dust
can you with such as you carry bury by trail or roadside
the burdens that blossom or better
let blossom
how trouble takes to hedgerow like it’s native
and in winter vines itself close and deeper in
the want of contact
even that’s beautiful if you let it
the goldenness of missing at table
who once gathered near
let it wash through you what you loved first as lark
and rosebud turned socket and bone
the lovely axis that rotates us lunar
and how that means we are always either
coming towards one another or moving away
can you with such beauty
as you will never touch make your peace by looking
feast-wise at what is set before you once you carried
half a black wing
two miles in your sweaty hand then told no one
as you placed it on blue saucer and there it stays
gathering all the love you’ve ever felt
into its embroidery of death make your peace
with beauty that eddies & elides
make do with the riverbed all love becomes
the lovely axis that rotates us lunar
not in this new-budding spring
That I Lay Down in this Grass
about the fact that I lay down in this grass
that below me the earth is rising up it feels
in answer to me about the rumor
that I am loved across atoms and quarks
by you more than most your work in the afterlife
another shining troubled lyric
about the matter of the way in which
as the leaves come in over bare branches
on the lane where you come to visit me
you’re a young hawk then those same branches
then simply the sky layering me down with its blue light
the fact that I would lay down
in such a light that the parts that were yours
at our atom-birth remain by me closely guarded
so as to return them to you
somewhere among mountain bluets or in the cosmic background radiation
but not now you tell me not in this new-budding spring
yours to work and feel yours to even out
and sew a line through or something like that
the work the sky does to unfurl each leaf its outermost
you have to work to feel it gentle as that
you remind me if in this grass
among bluets to meet me
Oh you my ravel
oh you my ravel and my depth
thing made bottomless by the stone’s reach
the smoke’s trail
oh you warlike in my ruins and keening in the blood
you of disappearing sky as I point you out
first star of evening before
the light years take you oh you my grief
which would please do
swallow me whole in a velvet darkness
that makes and bears me both oh you simultaneous
with never papered over in the record books
placed boxwise latched and thrown overboard
notwithstanding the written particulars of your country
geography indescribable because of its rich soil
its vast seas but there I’ve gone
and fallen into the trap of once more wanting to see
or taste you land of my nevers skin
of my new- & my un-borns
as if within my own body you’d made your travels
up synapse to my dark matter where I promise you
you’re composed both of fugue
and blue pollens could you I’m sure you would
take me to that place where our knot’s unraveling
where just by touching we could take
what’s tangled and lay it bare
oh you my straight way my end point
made not to reach how I’ve entered into
your every part
first star of evening before the light years take you