our orchards. Every morning
new apples dropped into the hollows
of their tracks.
We watched our windows warp and crack,
thought of our daughters’ hot foreheads,
of the fevers we knew would climb and climb
without breaking.
We were out of songs to hum. Our throats were boxes
of soot. In our orchards, no more insect thrum,
no swallow quaver.
How did we dare have children we couldn’t save?
If we closed our eyes, the falling apples
sounded like heavy rain.
AFTERIMAGE
After the explosion: the longest night.
The shock spins a dream around us which,
for our protection, refuses to end.
Outside the dream, songbirds fall from the trees
and sing their way to ash.
Inside the dream, we look out the window
at the sun that is not really a sun, which brightens
and brightens until our eyes are melted glass.
We watch our bodies flicker like lightning
against the wall. We watch them fall
and get back up again and fall
and stay down.
With every breath the dream thins like the skin
of a balloon until we can see the inside
and the outside of the dream at the same time,
the birds swooping from the trees to land
beside their own bones,
our bodies reaching down to grab our shadows
by the hands.
AFTERSKY
The blue noonday sky, cloudless, has lost its old look of immensity
LEWIS THOMAS
Note: there has been some speculation about the state of the sky—
whether it is an infinite mouth dragging its gasp across us
or whether it is a tent
or whether it is there at all.
When it is a mouth, we shoot its white teeth down.
When it is a tent, we slit its skin to let in the rain.
When it is not there at all, we rank the shades of nothing according to their hue:
alice blue
iris blue
a blue of such majesty it can’t be looked at
pale blue
a vast and uniform heaven
ultramarine
falling through the ocean
falling asleep
this eve of blackness
neat, delicate, deep black
the black dilated iris
panic
the long black trail
absolutely black and appalling
When the sky is not there at all, we pound stakes through our shoes
to keep us close to the ground.
We tarp our windows so we are not tempted
to smash the glass and let the aftersky suck us outward
like marrow from the bones of our houses.
Black at noon, black in the afternoon.
Black hail falls from somewhere and melts invisibly in the yard.
The grass fattens with alien dew.
the dark
is everywhere
is
a confusion . We
are
profoundly
lonely a reed
In the
Sea
THE MEADOW, THE RIVER
The meadow unfolded before me,
a soft, uncrossable rot.
I tore myself in two along my spine and sent half of me
into the night to see if I would make it through.
I waited at the meadow’s black mouth.
What news? I practiced asking the grass,
the shadows of black-eyed Susans, my boots.
The gone edge of me felt clean against the wind’s hand.
The gone edge of me felt bright and hot.
It was hard to see in the dark with just one eye
but I thought I could see the other half of me
moving slowly across the meadow.
Was I waving, or was that just the wind in my hair?
Was I calling, or did the wind just bend itself across my ear?
I put my foot down and felt the grass rise around it
like a river. Like the way a lover might rise
from the
