The maples sweat now, out of season.
Buds pop eyes in wintry bushes
as the birds arrive, not having checked
the calendars or clocks. They scramble
in the frost for seeds, while underground
a sobbing starts in roots and tubers.
Ice cracks easily along the bank.
It slides in gullies where a bear, still groggy,
steps through coiled wire of the weeds.
Kids in T-shirts run to school, unaware
that summer is a long way off.
Their teachers flirt with off-the-wall assignments,
drum their fingers on the sweaty desktops.
As for me, my heart leaps high—
a deer escaping from the crosshairs,
skipping over barely frozen water
as the surface bends and splinters underfoot.

The house had gone to bring again 
To the midnight sky a sunset glow. 
Now the chimney was all of the house that stood, 
Like a pistil after the petals go. 

The barn opposed across the way, 
That would have joined the house in flame 
Had it been the will of the wind, was left 
To bear forsaken the place’s name. 

No more it opened with all one end 
For teams that came by the stony road 
To drum on the floor with scurrying hoofs 
And brush the mow with the summer load. 

The birds that came to it through the air 
At broken windows flew out and in, 
Their murmur more like the sigh we sigh 
From too much dwelling on what has been. 

Yet for them the lilac renewed its leaf, 
And the aged elm, though touched with fire; 
And the dry pump flung up an awkward arm; 
And the fence post carried a strand of wire. 

For them there was really nothing sad. 
But though they rejoiced in the nest they kept, 
One had to be versed in country things 
Not to believe the phoebes wept. 

Out walking in the frozen swamp one grey day 
I paused and said, "I will turn back from here. 
No, I will go on farther—and we shall see." 
The hard snow held me, save where now and then 
One foot went down. The view was all in lines 
Straight up and down of tall slim trees 
Too much alike to mark or name a place by 
So as to say for certain I was here 
Or somewhere else: I was just far from home. 
A small bird flew before me. He was careful 
To put a tree between us when he lighted, 
And say no word to tell me who he was 
Who was so foolish as to think what he thought. 
He thought that I was after him for a feather—
The white one in his tail; like one who takes 
Everything said as personal to himself. 
One flight out sideways would have undeceived him. 
And then there was a pile of wood for which 
I forgot him and let his little fear 
Carry him off the way I might have gone, 
Without so much as wishing him good-night. 
He went behind it to make his last stand. 
It was a cord of maple, cut and split 
And piled—and measured, four by four by eight. 
And not another like it could I see. 
No runner tracks in this year's snow looped near it. 
And it was older sure than this year's cutting, 
Or even last year's or the year's before. 
The wood was grey and the bark warping off it 
And the pile somewhat sunken. Clematis 
Had wound strings round and round it like a bundle. 
What held it though on one side was a tree 
Still growing, and on one a stake and prop, 
These latter about to fall. I thought that only 
Someone who lived in turning to fresh tasks 
Could so forget his handiwork on which 
He spent himself, the labour of his axe, 
And leave it there far from a useful fireplace 
To warm the frozen swamp as best it could 
With the slow smokeless burning of decay.

My river was once unseparated. Was Colorado. Red-
fast flood. Able to take

       anything it could wet—in a wild rush—

                                 all the way to Mexico.

Now it is shattered by fifteen dams
over one-thousand four-hundred and fifty miles,

pipes and pumps filling
swimming pools and sprinklers

      in Los Angeles and Las Vegas.

To save our fish, we lifted them from our skeletoned river beds,
loosed them in our heavens, set them aster —

      ‘Achii ‘ahan, Mojave salmon,

                                Colorado pikeminnow—

Up there they glide, gilled with stars.
You see them now—

      god-large, gold-green sides,

                                moon-white belly and breast—

making their great speeded way across the darkest hours,
rippling the sapphired sky-water into a galaxy road.

The blurred wake they drag as they make their path
through the night sky is called

      ‘Achii ‘ahan nyuunye—

                                our words for Milky Way.

Coyote too is up there, crouched in the moon,
after his failed attempt to leap it, fishing net wet

      and empty, slung over his back—

                                a prisoner blue and dreaming

of unzipping the salmon’s silked skins with his teeth.
O, the weakness of any mouth

      as it gives itself away to the universe

                                of a sweet-milk body.

Just as my own mouth is dreamed to thirst
the long desire-ways, the hundred-thousand light year roads

      of your throat and thighs.

Sea’s stony greenblue shatters to white
          in a running swell under noonsky of cloudlight
where on a foamed-over cropping of rock
          a band of oystercatchers faces all one way
into a nor’wester so shafts of windlight
          ignite each orange beak in this abiding
tribe of black till you clap and their risen black
          turns white as they veronica on wind and
then away with them (shrill-pitched as frighted
          plovers only harsher more excited)
and riding the stiff wind like eager lovers straining
          into its every last whim: its pulsing steady
heart-push in every flesh-startling open-eyed
          long-extended deepening sea-breath.