The Night Won't Save Anyone

Someday our bodies will no longer matter,

and we will leave them in our sleep, to travel easily.

But until then,

I will tramp like this through the woods

and not worry that this is the same snow

that falls gently between us-

What separates people

happens by accident, like unexpected weather,

and it is also caused

by the fact that there is always another handshake

to be done without,

always another unnecessary embrace.

It's the way there are those extra pear trees over there

next to those extra houses, which one day

will be moved out of.

In one of them, a man and a woman are kissing.

Sun is pouring in through the windows,

and behind them a gold paper fan is spread out

on the mantlepiece.

Now I realize they are my parents,

and everything seems suddenly empty.

Or maybe I'm afraid of losing what never happens

by having it happen.

I turn away.

It has grown darker.

The crows are where they aren't supposed to be,

on the scarecrow.

The horses have already forgotten what daylight is.

The swallows are leaving.

A dried nest falls from the barn.

The smell of damp hay.

Steam rising from manure.

The boy ringing a bell doesn't care if] listen.

He doesn't mind if I come up to the house,

or keep sleeping each night on a torn sack in the barn.

I admire his indifference.

But how quickly the sun sets on this page!

The night has a certain, how shall I say it, style:

it is not concise and reminds me of

my own poems.

And the night won't save anyone.

It has another life, like I do, outside the poem,

and in that life, there isn't any landscape,

just the mind doing its work,

the mind which always wants to cling to such things as

deer trotting through rain,

while at the same time wanting to be rid of them.

It's the way I try to visualize my childhood friends

and they grow smaller, as if am walking away from

them.

Their faces begin to dissolve in a spiral.

I should have left them alone.

This has happened before.

Sometimes, while I am sitting in my room reading,

my mind will pass through the book

the way water passes through a grid and eventually finds

itself

joining a river

which silently passes from town to town

by the factories and stockyards.

I turn the page.

The shade deepens on the lawn.

I can remember the way I felt as a child

when I would go out into the woods and think of myself

as invisible.

I was convinced I could become part of the foliage.

Now I often feel the reverse,

as though I stand out in a landscape,

a scarecrow in a burned field.

This makes me wonder if most people

think that winter is like an equation

to which they are being added.

Or maybe, to them, the sky is just so much whiteness.

If so, they are better off,

because they don't have to spend their time

wanting to be as perfect as the silence after a long rain,

nor do they have to worry about feeling overlooked

by the birch trees.

Instead, they can look into themselves.

But when I look into myself,

I feel as though I am looking into a pond in which the

water

is hiding something,

the bones from last year's drowning, the split jawbone,

the cracked skull.

I must go on admiring myself,

though it's the same as admiring a sunset

which is to be feared because of its nakedness.

And I go on believing that these words are real,

that they want to signify more than the rainy sky

or the early October evening.

But as I say each one, it looks for something concrete

the way grief goes looking for a dead loved one,

or the way a wind scavenges through yellow leaves,

looking for the visible part of itself.