Lately, I feel the days fly out into the dark trees
and vanish.
Without you whose love was air-thin and particular,
I’m left these
daughter-hands of bone that do me little good,
arms fit
for nothing but wandering vast terrain. Restless,
attuned to
wayward frequencies, I crave the open space
of fields.
Sleep rinses me little clean—& the hours keep
opening their
dark show-boxes of emptiness. Each breath—
a white button
undone. See what our hands know? How to open
the earth
at summer’s end. Watch me, I say, queen of the shades,
watch me
from wherever you are, mother, the word on my lips
five shades
of white—chalk, milk, titanium, snow. First there’s a harvest.
Then a death.
Then a field where absence in wildness begins to grow.