YAM YAD

MAY DAY

Until the day they cut the maple

off the grave for fear of the power-lines,

after all we’ve done so as not to remember,

yew by the labyrinth axe in the barn-door

aesthetic issues for some hapless inheritor,

bodies crawling from the pleasant backyard

perennial desire old as wood;

touch anything and you’re done for,

space shows you its vertical axis,

open the door then up and up

starlings kettle in thermal updraft

in triangular proportion to desire

and the need to understand, come stand on my feet:

thirty-six birds, I wonder if we have

thirty six teeth, as Luria seems to suggest

carve through a single word

and if two people remember a third person

whose name is breath, would the greater mind

be less unique, a thousand edges of sweet spring air

flocking crystalline fragments fragrance

that turn the sky blue with incomplete sentences

that risk our clothes and petrified spelling:

how many fingers can go on in one touch,

all talk is mythology in a world of solid wood

words dance around the tree and carry off its root

when I talk like this it means I’m listening to you

clear and hardy images, alpine varieties, 

serrated leaves and hairy stems, we must already 

have travelled far, if we’re already in the habit

of having four arms, and sight goes where birds go

when you only have one eye, and the sun cavorts

in the beach-glass as if we knew each other on some distanter shore.