MOONLIGHT

Soon it chanced we stood
in very superstition
filled with the dim moonlight
of these times.
          Small hours made
by the phenomenon of saws.

        Before I had reached despair, some fresh talaria brought out a smile from John. His feet married the soil, begetting posterity of prints upon the world.

        He still had faith in a rainbow obscured by night, which for a short while may have shimmered in the morning. I knew he had poor ways, but if we were to change masks at the horizon, luck might change its bait too.

This was my confidence in their system.
So many were already dead.
This was becoming a killed land.

__

THE RAIN

"One attraction
in living here was that
I should have fog, and fog to see
the rain come in. I remember when
one day my heel was honeycombed in
pondwater. But the snow grew warmer.
It was not sensibly worn away by the sun—
not broken up and melted off as after the rain.

Then after a warm spring followed their opportunity.
It would have wholly disappeared, all gone off
for their leisure, spirited away. They told
me the large bluebird was no longer
necessary. One day I went across
the woods only five days
before it disappeared
entirely."

____

from In Memory of Pines

This is what happens when you lock yourself up with nothing to read but Walden and the Oulipo Compendium.