Moonrise Over City Trees The world underbark has long been night. Roots are a bareknuckled boxer's hands in asphalt; now as in a negative they are silvering. Knots turn to diamond chips. The amputated twig is a trident of latten that would spear trampling feet. Tempests rush through distended limbs, a tendrilous glowing diffused on brickscape where thrown crabapples cling. And once when lovers passed this arbor an owl laughed; small birds sang. The Frost Garments Wind-creased they froze that way. Our lines were the ribbed underbelly of a neglected pet. Against morning indigo, shirts held their breath from our dream sleep. Crucified with crude pinnings they stiffened, rimed in ragged entrails. Our pants shriveled and seamed, paraplegic in their pose. Stilt-legs incised the air; stuffed handkerchiefs bloomed from backpockets like cold, folded roses. Once more we took them down, cuffs still-lifed and clamped in rigor mortis. With cellar warmth our clothes sagged again, the frumpy remnants of what we had worn. They held our sleep longer than we, and grayer by hours we tended them back to our mortals' motions. Wrinkles released, our shirts unaged, and we thawed, wringing the night from our sleeves. Cutting the Hemlock Spruce Sawmill floor unshaven, chips shoelace deep, hardwood releases the strength of everything it holds. Sanding over knags I feel the wounds soften, Beowulf binding Grendel's hacked shoulder. I dissect it, my eyes quadrupled behind plastic; roughened fingers peel the phloem away, the cell-skin letting go, opening to heartwood and the bone that cannot bend. Its rings trace the hardest winter and most casual summer. The bark saved for soil, trim-ends untangle; slabs restrain the seasons of my life, now lost in edgings. A Colonial Graveyard Next to a Leather Factory Beyond the cemetery sunset hangs in tiers on tilted windows. Vents spit dyes on the dirt that had driven deer in season, drays, and the sodden hands of desperate farmers. Hidden beer cans cluster in unchecked weeds. With the sun at angles the headstones are oblique; shadows double their image so the ones buried, bodiless, are without their callings, their labors anonymous, almost unworth the face of ground. After hours the dry grass disentangles. Moonlight blanches those Biblical names, the markers grown hide-thin. The same wind will dry their dust, their epitaphs, to dry the hands of sweatbacked men at their cutters, their forearms weaker than the driest blades. Closing the Moviehouse "Condemned" signs mask posters, cosmetic webs on ticket-booth windows. Velvet ropes coil about the arms of the hardhats, the gum-pocked chairs brought out for auctioning. Hoping to glimpse the screen in full day we stand as close as we can, adjust our vision to the light-dark. Celluloid strips come back to dimension; ticket wheels unravel, reeling our old silences into the street, our dim, kept ambitions clipped from frames. Stiltingly this work goes on, our own faces pale in the absence of heroes. The Night Driver A blue light buzzes with each burnt moth, snapping the way a bartender unfolds dollar bills. Cats sulk in the lame grass, their mouths whiskered even more. I exhale, and smoke ties bows around the mirror. Looking back, I see houses in half-light like Halloween masks dwindling into miniatures. Shins of telephone poles stagger into distances. Abandoned cars have crept upon one another, and rusted into uselessness. The drone of wasps deafens the woods. Mosquito-thick headlights wash the road amber. My skin is gray. In my bones something sleeps. Trail Horses Grazing at Dusk Their backs hammock sunset, and with imperial glances they look at the uneaten grass, their nostrils pinching the white air. Bales are the piratical chests they covet. Blinders gone, the trails hoofed down, they shake their pulled-at manes like dustmops. They need no fences, even saddle-stripped. Their haunches unflex in the weight of just themselves, the marks from dulled spurs still stinging a little. But they know the time shadows lengthen, and are judicial. They imagine the stirrups corseting their ribs, the bits between teeth, then they let their shadows grow with their silence. As they eat, carrying a belly or a backful, they nuzzle the grass, and need no fences. Two Horses Unbridled, they are along the snow line where silence draws a whitened path, the reins loosened from the hands of sleeping men. The dawn is symmetric in their eyes. Their manes drip from them, frozen to their last gallop. Icebits cling like pollen from the last storm. Perhaps the fear of slaughter has brought them here. Barbed strands spike in a quietus of their coming. Braced eight hands high their tree stands stripped for switches. Hooves crunch over hardened circles; scarred shanks stumble over buried habits, over silence that swirls through the leviathan elms. Beyond, their stalls are empty. They cannot falter, not this time. All Saints' Day Chocolate wrappers lie among leaves and cored apples. Pushed up from the ground, stalks lean impuissantly. Egg yolks dry on car windows, pastelling the new air. The stuffed men on porch roofs belly over embryonically, like the war dead, some decapitated, their bruised rinds of skulls battered like pumpkins. Satan's mask hangs from a phone pole. The wind embodies it. The Catfish Gorgon-headed, wriggling in the marsh, the growth dense as the bristles on a sloth's back, it has nothing but its breadth of body, threatening the stammer of minnows that rush anywhere from its wake. When you net one, its countenance stares you down on your own soil, daring the dry air to subsume it, its gills puffed, haughtily dethroned. Still it resists, and in your whole waterless domain its visage stalks one like you. The Ghost Moving through rooms filled with midnight I wear my grandfather's robe. Five years gone he sleeps shoeless, digging into himself, sorting the dirt damp with let-go roots. He left his fingers dangling from a thread of this robe, his slippered wakefulness catching a cat by the scruff, shuffling across unnailed floorboards; then feverish throughout his flesh he turned thin as handkerchiefs. Tonight I smooth the frayed elbows and knot the rope stretched loose from a settled waist. vicariously we walk in the same skin, the collar goitered from things left unsaid. The housewalker sleeps with open eyes. Diner The waitress's hand seems Formica hard. Erasures from her smile crease her cheeks without expression. Conversations run like broken eggs. From the highway smoke ushers in a formless man, his closed lips telling where he's been. His blood becomes coffee in heavy cups. Tintinnabula lingers in the ear and in the bent prongs of once-stolen forks. In forgotten sunglasses neon repeats itself in reverse. Fingers pass over initials etched forever in some dented chrome. After the Ice Storm Trees without root; birches arch, crown to dirt, Scratching hieroglyphs in the snow. Shrubs ossify; their thickened twigs grit At the sculpted smoke of branches. Wires are down, suturing the lacquered stones. Weighted with absence, clotheslines sag, Stiffen. The sheets that canopied seedlings Have shriveled into bruised pears. All night I heard the splinter of unknown things. The woods had whitened, shredding into disarray. Morning cages the window. The suet left for Grackles stays wrapped to a warped elm. Deer, entering the field, will leave no prints, Only hunger when they leave. Stories the Farmhand Told And one, this happened years ago, occurred With five mares getting electrocuted. Electrocuted! The milk truck severed A low-hanging wire, a main line that fed The house and barn. The sparks it sent up Made the horses run, frightened, to the fence (That was barbed), a conductor from the top To fencepost, and they didn't have a chance. We found them huddled and scorched, and their eyes Stared at death the way, I suppose, ours would. The silence is so loud when something dies, And it never has come to any good. Their manes were stiff as bristles, then the boys Took them to be put away like toys. The Burned Barn Crows bend in the air like stripped umbrellas. Fireweed strands into the forehead of the clearing ground; acorns that swelled over a rainbarrel are the black pearls that necklace the lost calf. Too quick to rot, an axehandle has been charred into the shin- bone of anything that couldn't leave itself. Tilted slats are the tobacco-black teeth of drunken farmhands. Their fingers claw at the weakened boards, almost anxious for decay. A cycle left wedged in a beam is skinned in new rust; it cracks as a boot kicks at it. Hinges creak louder. The rickets of old things make them snap at any sound. The caught owl swings pendulously, alive in its silence and dead in our hands. Kuerner's Springhouse after _Wyeth at Kuerners_ Pressed cider ages in its vat. The trees, varicose, haven't yet known their foliage. Hoarfrost seeps between slats, the springhouse stumped like a smiling whittler's one tooth, its public road cow-drawn stamped down with crescent hoofs and wheel ruts slicing into a season that just begins or ends. The Image of Tomorrow as Seen through Smoked Glass Once twilight dwindles to a needle's eye it catches the flower vase, opaque, a sentinel on the parlor's coffee table. There's a smattering-- a constellation settled in the hard-cornered glass, embering as though it kept camp with cosmos-- Jupiter rising to a milkweed stem, and then an eclipse: a cat's tail passes and darkens eternity, but brings with it stirred dust and a manifold moon, daguerreotyped, quartered by translucence, in its own phases clocking the protracted shadows lengthened by a lowered shade, with the universe contained. Late Snow on Condemned Cars Off the turnpike their burial grounds thicken. Cracked windshields are webbed white, and grills grin with rabid iron. Disemboweled engines, scavenged for parts, spurt frayed wires draining the last of the anti-freeze. Bald tires wreath the spaces where skunks will curl in summer. Convertibles have couched upon one another, flat and identical, while among burnt and rusted doors a slashed seat sprouts grackles. Spring In my soapskinned mug the draught's head withers. The ventilator belches forth no fumes, and drunken jokes spear the cigar-ash air. Filled ashtrays overflow like mushroom gardens untended, their heads toward some flickering light. Through neon doors someone lets the night in; it no longer stammers, and among the fresh sawdust overalls shuttle past on thick-soled shoes. Exeunt In morning light A moth floats lazily, Doubling itself over pondwater. Leafage splits the mossed-over surface That moves slowly, unwinding Like threads from a shawl. Cocoons muscle the overhanging trees That brush water, Playing for the sun as it rises >From the wren's nest Adamantine with new eyes. Along the outworn path frogs rest Under shaded stones, Their tongues licking at horseflies, While light commands Sound and searching, wind and comfort. And in the thickest of woods chainsaws hum like bees.