Poetry

It is an old drama
this disappearance of the leaves,
this seeming death
of the landscape.

He manages like somebody carrying a box
that is too heavy, first with his arms
underneath. When their strength gives out,

This morning I sit across from you
at the same small table,
the sun italicizing

A raindrop fell on my hand,
crafted from the Ganges and the Nile,

from the ascended frost of a seal’s whiskers,
from water in broken pots in the cities of Ys and Tyre.

No, I just can’t write today, I said
to myself, sprawling on the couch, my mind
an open invitation to sleep, when there it was:
The Invisible Hand. A title. Having arrived
unbidden, it felt like inspiration,

The poems of air are slowly dying;
too light for the page, too faint, too far away,
the ones we’ve called The Moon, The Stars, The Sun,
sink into the sea or slide behind the cooling trees
at the field’s edge. The grave of light is...

My friend has not called. I send her poems.
She says she likes them,
though they tell too much about farm life,
too little about me.
When I visit her in the summer, she says
she hates her job, she’d like
for me to live closer, that she’s afraid...