A Goose 

In grey cold the clear

I mean sharp existence

of things

hard silent lawns

it is my blood moves:

the click of bats, beat

        night’s hearts

leap through the blood

in my cold exterior

outside on the kitchen stool.

The last duck drifts across

the still lake, she clears her throat

between banks of cattails, skimming them

sonars the passage of her life

in the night of all her looking.

Before her skeptical eyes

Diana’s mice can gnaw my horse

back to a bottle of hay

she learns the edges now

for when the body flies south

& it’s the blood that takes account

a fire noisy with listening.

***

To be a fallen chandelier unreflexive on

a milky november day is to be the inverse

of Neptune gone direct in me same milky day

the phantoms rise & lurch through the blood

keeping one eye on the fire like Joel

a locust plague sparks & floods, flutes

from the wood our oldest kind of prophecy

you make a world & voice the place of it

black locust and even the impudent flames

must follow your meter

all those sweaty trojans zipped into the horse

start to teach her the lake and gone with the mist.

Are boys at the tie-up fishing god knows why.

To be numbered among those I never saw, I will miss them

today for you, the great art of not looking stand

facing the fire and talk about what’s behind you

that is the fire also look and there is nothing

he says, or he means. Don’t look and it’s everywhere:

that’s just a special kind of looking. And then what is she?

is no longer a question.

Sequana, in France you catch her

in April and wish yourself a good life.

Here the geese (I wrote guess) fly over

the mountains, you have to understand

I live in a big house, I’ve started yelling

and a couple letters come together

form a little intimacy, a handful of black birds

tossed loosely across the horizon.

Guess which one’s yours.