NOVEMBER SENDS ME A POSTCARD
Across the wan November sky
a lone heron is ferrying
the slack bag of his body, slung
beneath the neat-tucked neck. Not high
nor hurriedly he goes, but slow,
under a dough of cloud thin-stretched
and risen over fields; he’s fetched
from here to there by something known
in arrow-beak, and steady wings,
and sinew. Wide, diffused, the light
slants like a skimmed stone, and the night
sits, ready, inside day. Air brings,
all leaf-rot-rich, the smell of rest:
though not yet fierce with coming cold
it’s promise-pricked, and says What’s old
may be surrendered, and what’s next
will come. Inside me, something yields
and drops its gold, like leaves released.
The far crows caw in bared, black trees,
and tupped sheep wait in ochre fields.
SUBJECT TO GRAVITY
Like a soft, high chord on a piano
or a pianissimo shimmer of strings
a white chiffon mist has been shaken out
across the valley and hangs there
oblivious to the coming hours
which are being forged
in the astonishing molten orange sky
behind the eastern hills. That held-breath
moment, the parabola’s high point:
the unbearable beauty of beginnings
and your heart’s prayer for exemption,
that you might stay here and never drop
out of those incandescent crucible heavens
into the merely blue.
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