Injunction

Needles of rain. Ground makes no moan
Wind-sigh in the sycamore. What’s passing.
Haw berries rusting the hawthorn hedges.

Don’t look back. Think Orpheus. Pillar of salt.
One breath, then another. Sweat of apprehension.
Still life with wind and breadcrumbs.

But I keep wanting to turn around.
No whimsy in it, staggering the gamut
bright red. And as deadly, she said, as nightshade.

Still you went on. Looking at her lips.
Sea verge to cliff edge, no shaking off
what shadows you. Seeing that

rain-swollen torrent at Gurteen,
you wanted to give yourself over
to its foamy, stone-broken dissolution

of salt. And then? What’s not, she said,
possible. Or was it a question?
Even this rocky crevice

where the wren is nesting.


Harmonia

The shape a solitary oarsman makes as he dips and lifts his two blades
and they pend a second or two like thin wings angled from the scull
and leave behind him on the blue skin of water the clean design
of a fish—spine and ribs exactly finished where the sunstruck Schuylkill

sickles Philadelphia.  How the precise line of hills west of the Hudson
is etched by the sun gone behind them, and the air’s incarnadined—
as a fire might start inside your skin and flush your bones to visibility,
making your shape more absolute, bright, and final than I can imagine.  

Or how a dancer I know moves across campus this mist-shawled morning,
her book-satchel swaying off one shoulder and her black clogs glistening  
with wet grass, a green sweater bunched at her waist—letting me see
how a body can be at one with itself, every part moving together, lifting her  

above the clutch of gravity the way a rising flock of starlings opens, closes
so it might be one body, but distributed, feeling bound like that and free.