Classic Poem

My enemy. What is green and prickly-sick
or most yours—you live by it. Thoughtless
greed washing up and down your spine.
My knees barely hold me to the ground but I am
arborescing. I would not have known to
cull through all the hints and looks that now un-
clasp like padlocks. While I was holding on to
parts and tatters, you were famished, defiant,
compassing the possible consequences of
public subterfuge. Although you yawn,
each of us has been warped by separation.
The cause of night is not fathomless—
the pine-fields breathe when the sun draws off.
Hoof-prints of deer fold under new snow.
Blindsided I held to him, not understanding what has now
opened in our midst. For me it is not common,
it is not comic. Take your time. You may yet find
that what we share rescinds itself with every hour,
a ghost who will not be encumbered by any
will not his own. Through the keyhole is a cut-out,
a miniature view of future colorless gauze.
I am all alone with you in that emptiness.
***

My enemy. You may still find a home there.
As every hour you fail to heed my presence
my eyes grow more alive. Once crumpled paper
my body knits itself to skin and lines,
warm cord of my spine, and beyond my arms birds
motionless and quiet, rubies in the trees.
Your aggression, your estrangements are not
mine. Would you bring the minutes closer
to you, would the hill’s red shadows
darken with that slight opiate sweetness,
would you understand the ropy blush of trees—
would you keep them company?
Can you understand company? I had lost my way.
Hardly visible by day, I stared all fall at that old
hopelessness. Evasions and tracks. Over years
I mistook the scree for slope, the feral hours for trifles.
Love so sprang at me I forgot there should be
more than that effusion, and as the music
withered I insisted it had strength.
As you have, as I have. The way you hold
something in you matters. Black oak
gliding into itself as the dawn lifts and arcs.
***

Nominal. You are not inscrutable.
A long drink of fog as March wells up from
clumps of mud. By April more will become clear,
more wind, more water loosened from packed snow.
Knotted up, at home in this beseeching season
where children in pink jackets strain against the
skyless gray, you find people bothersome.
Hubris. Ampersands and thumbtacks.
No talent thrives without humanity.
No bookmark holds grievance for a spot.
But you are not without grace, for what you may
come to love, I too loved. Do you ever
follow those strands back to me, whom you
so effortlessly injured? As he leans into you,
you may starve less, you whom I shall not reach
or speak to, through cooled-over anger and puzzlement
now thinned to puddles. Strange.
The dirt seems no longer to tremble.
As if one had laid to rest a crucial desire
and said I understand. It is yours.