WINTER ORCHARD
It is November and you, my love,
are crying among the apple trees,
weaving in and out of the years.
For a while we stalk our shadows
between two worlds
hoping to see the beautiful
bodies that made them.
I feel myself fading from your sight
as winter closes in.
I can’t hear your tunes anymore,
the black trees with their beards of lichen
bow to us, tears hang on for the last flurry.
Nothing
but the memory of our features,
dust filling the imprint on the road.
I DREAM THE DREAM OF THE DEAD
What flies out of my breast are the birds of happiness.
I hear the cluck of the bantam on her nest of eggs
and the sweet carol of the yellow-beaked blackbird
glowing in the grey morning,
the trill and roll of the lark notes rising, rising
into the steel blue stillness over the clearing.
When I wake it is to a new life, this, my sky,
the glance that took me from you a vague memory.
I know I have come through something important
and when you ask me if I slept well last night,
at least to myself after the struggles of middle-age
I am hardly recognizable with these retracted claws, new wings.