Dead Man, Thinking

i.
    Snow geese in the light of morning sky, 
exactly at the start of spring.  I was 
    looking through the cracks of the blinds at my future which seemed 
absent of parades, for which I was grateful, 
    and only yesterday

                
I watched what an April wind could do 
    to a body wrapped in silk, 
though I turned my eyes away, 
    the way the teacher says, 
once the beauty was revealed.  

ii
How long it takes to die, in the fifty-fifth year
    is what I thought about today.  
I told some truths so large, no one could bear to hear them.  
    I bow down to those who could not hear the truth.  
They could not hear the truth because they were afraid 
    that it would open a veil into nothing.  
I bow down to that nothing.  I bow down to a single red planet 
    I saw in the other world’s sky, 
spinning, 
    as if towards some
fleshy inevitability.  

    I bow down to the red planet. I bow down 
to the noisy birds, indigenous to this region. 
    Only sorrow can bend you in half 
    like you’ve seen on those whose loves have gone away. 
I bow down to those loves.  

OH NATURE

     Today some things worked as they were meant to.
A big spring wind came up and blew down
     from the verdant neighborhood trees,
millions of those little spinning things,
     with seeds inside, and my heart woke up alive again too,
as if the brain could be erased of its angry hurt;
     fat chance of that, yet
things sometimes work as they were meant,
     like the torturer who finally can’t sleep,
or the god damn moon
     who sees everything we do
and who still comes up behind clouds
     spread out like hands to keep the light away.

Home

I didn't know I was grateful
            for such late-autumn
                        bent-up cornfields

yellow in the after-harvest
             sun before the
                        cold plow turns it all over

into never.
            I didn't know
                        I would enter this music

that translates the world
             back into dirt fields
                         that have always called to me

as if I were a thing
              come from the dirt,
                          like a tuber,

or like a needful boy. End
             lonely days, I believe. End the exiled
                          and unraveling strangeness.