Dark Water, Hole in the Sky
I float among
Lonely animals, longing
For the red spider who is God.
–James Wright
Just look at the trees,
bare as birth. How much clearer we see
the nests. I watch from the grass a skein of geese
that did not make it far enough south. I touch
maple leaves, brittle as herring bone. I won’t
come anymore, the trees
cry. My palms meet and then
open. I pick up a leaf and look at our veins
and see telephone wires, harp-strings, baleen:
millions of filtered krill. The sky
is a sheet I cannot
throw. I walk
slow. There is the building where the old man
sits at a desk and touches his scalp,
his few hairs spar and twine, then his finger
points a spire. I lie on backs of spiders
chest up; the ants clear the aisle.
There is nothing in the sky
but a hole like the pupil of an eye. The tires
move over the road; I drag my knuckle across the wall:
the scrape of a keel, a wake of skin. Hooked worm,
you will throb for three days. Hardening on the flesh,
there is the heart. There is all
we know of it.
Tonight the folds
will close over me. My scabs
will rub against the sheets, and her hand.
In my dream, I will not die
by water. I will die
upon the wing.
