1
Logs uncaulked, walls all stud
and rough board, plumbing dangling like loose
bones,
gaping vents in the hallway
and switch boxes
spilling wires, the furnace still crated on blocks
in the yard of knapweed and dust …
The faucet ticks onto a greasy plate
and wind rakes a tarp
off the porch.
An old woman with a weak heart,
at the kitchen table, near nightfall, ponders
the congested emptiness, at a loss
among hammer and power saw, chisel blade and
level,
drills with their blued bits scattered among shavings,
deadbolts and the knobs of doors,
an overturned Thermos,
a red handkerchief draped on a sawhorse.
The moon chills her window,
the women from church are late with her supper.
She stares across the room at an unlaced boot,
a gray wool sock worn thin
at the heel –
Just tell me the time,
don’t build me a clock
and dreads the cleaning out of closets,
the smell of old shirts.
2
And how hard for the soul
to put down the hammer, to understand the last nail
is never driven
and square itself to the blueprint,
to brush off desire
and responsibility like a day’s worth of sawdust
and walk through an untrimmed doorway
into a windy field, nothing
on the horizon but the signal fires of angels.
How dizzy the soul must be
floating in that first violent gust of timelessness,
that flurry of images we can hardly imagine,
tumble of faces over landscape,
gust of past and future dove-tailing.
How it must miss in early evening
something as solid as a bar of chocolate
or a hand across a table.
Rocks grate down the cliffside,
the tin roof
rattles on the guinea coop. Still the soul
must grow happy singing under the hill
in that network of roots,
or pitching its voice
to the needles and wind.
3
In the Cabinet Mountains
of western Montana
I saw something in the sky like a page from
Revelation-
high against a white ridge of clouds, two eagles
fighting over a kill. You couldn’t tell
from that distance
what they were pulling between them,
something large
and black
balled in their talons
then they dropped it
and falling it uncoiled, twisted and flipped,
a live rope in mid-air
tumbling itself into loops, into bows,
then straightened
and curled as though trying to bite its tail —
a few seconds of horror, or ecstasy,
or beauty,
before an eagle plunged
and caught it, rose and broke the clouds.
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