Like songs.

If you doubt it, then

Rise away. The tiny calligraphies reach left to right.

The green birch in the sideways

Flux of snow

Is as real as any fairy tale--any handwritten note,

Or hummable song.

A road in the fair.

A road in the fair

Takes time to sink into

The traveler--

Into the muscle

Into the thrush of the glands.

Imagine the tranquility of the lane in

This thrushed land.

The footsteps prevail,

Outnumbered by the brawling Earth,

The Conodoguinet Creek.

I'm not gonna find it as you left it--

In incomplete February jade crystals from the grass contours

Crackling out.

Even the words will pass on by.

And when they're remembered the tongue will say

The current's name

With a nod to the origin--but all the same,

Differently.

This hole of an hour.

Attendez-vous!

The night is falling. And all that goes with it is falling.

One has to wonder in this hole of an hour

If all the things we've lost would have been

Lost,

Had we once looked up,

And measured this canopy

And its starry risks.

Standing in line.

The ocean has the semblance of a single file line.

One at a time.

To feel commitment means you are dove-soft--

That there is a raft waiting-- that

Maybe you might get back to where you were.

And even bad order is order.

Did you ever get your breath back?

I forgot to set the alarm.

No one knew because we lived after the echo had gone. I forgot to set the alarm.

People tend to fall in love with ideas, before people. They fall in love before they know what they're doing. One foot is in the light and soon enough the next. And soon enough it's all in the light.

If you speak too softly I'll never change.

O.

The O of a frost is not the center;

It is not where, if intruded upon,

The enclosive enemy would wish

To enter.

It is the oceanic constellation beyond

The cold Earthly wood,

--a piece of you would just as soon swim as watch,

Idealized by the inward traveling goer,

Branching out in oath and walk,

And decidedly through the shaded way

Of could.

Winter party.

Red footprints follow the damp walkway on--

Each memory of the moon is

An itinerary.

The back garden is boughed with Christmas lights,

And Pepsi fizz rises in the booze and

Plastic cups.

I was here when this was still being developed--before music.

The cleft pass.

I know that beyond the fence the stately grass rises, feral, and

Everything with it is feral.

Here in my lawn is the grand cornerstone I plow around.

Some time back it was the key to a wall. But it all

Fell back into the sea of things.

It was drowned in things.

To one side of where it vanished a pulmonescent

Bay of worry stands still.

To the opposite side of it

A way is there.

You must always remember you are a captive heart.

Winter glare.

I have gone to the window to broaden the light.

It's there.

As often in the rain I've hurried to it seal off--

It's there there, unfastened, as well.

So too--it's there-- is the ice-stiff month. So too the waiting.

With each precursor a thing ages and stales.