Six nights in June
It was the spring
we were just beginning
and we took the raft
out to the Smith River,
six days reading its white-water roil,
snow-melt autobiographies
torn across cliff walls,
nights in heaven’s darkness
beside the rushing water.
We took turns, one on the oar-rack seat,
the other spread-eagled
across the bow’s roped-down gear;
rode the stone-choked chutes,
told stories when it calmed
into the sheets of glass.
Late afternoons, watching
for turns where it slowed enough
along the far shore to land,
tied off for the night.
On the fourth day of the world,
orange light glazing the ochre cliffs,
updrafts bent
the stalks of goldenrod,
downed them like rows of dominoes
and revealed the swallows
clustered in their crevices,
a tenement of voices.
Like figure-skaters
they swooped down across the water,
pulled our gaze
to a spot on the far cliff’s shore
where the brush eased
into the suspicion of a path,
the body of a doe
hanging above the river
in a snow-bent alder,
caught by April’s
high-water rage.
Dream before I meet with your lawyer
Skates tied together
and slung on our shoulders,
we trudge in silence past
the new house-frame ghosts
and out along a road
that ends at a snow-covered field.
Knee deep, we plow
through the flood of snow,
push past maple-tree skeletons,
branches clattering in the wind,
and come to a highway culvert,
an arch bridging
a wide turn in a river.
Sheltered from the wind and snow,
its pond is frozen into clear ice.
Steady if you race,
everything stills when you skate,
stop and the voices
bump you off balance.
You have to lean forward,
bend your knees, push off,
gouge a grip
with the blades on your feet,
push and push again,
racing across the ice on knives.
We both fly the quarter-acre of ice,
shouting, vowels bouncing
off the culvert’s steel walls.
You slip out the far opening
and down along the snow-covered river.
I push to follow you
but your skate lines disappear.
I call and your name fades
across the graying field
as the snow begins to fall again,
covers the path we made
when it was still light enough
to see.
What silence is
They shuffle down the sidewalk
an old woman and her blind dog.
His name is careful, careful.
A towhee leaps off
into gone,
the feeder swaying
in the windless air.
Sounds evaporate into quiet
the vibrations braiding
into the smoothed hum
we call silence.
They say a thought
held in the mind
for seventeen seconds
draws energy to itself
and thereby initiates
a silent swirl of energy
that can manifest the idea.
Just as white is all the colors,
old voices weave
into the fabric of silence.
When I was a child, he’d tell me
no one gets in with you.
I pictured looking up
from the dirt walls of the hole,
what I’d make of the sounds
that fell on me
from the rectangle of sky.
A body needs to walk in silence,
a hymn we bloom within,
the voices scattered to quiet
and the wind
shudders the leaves
into a rushing wave.
