Yesterday, at twilight, a citron sky and bruised, high-toiling clouds.
The brook rattled over the same old stones like a woman too practiced in conversation.
I walked the dirt road alone, the road I have taken since childhood,
and I tried to hear, between the words, what the brook might really be saying.
What was the fear in this woman beneath her relentless talk?
I couldn’t translate. Loggers had cut a new gnash among the beeches and white pines.
The sky had rain on its mind. You were waiting for me
at home. These days I am reading a poet
of wounds, of stones, of fire and ice and other forms of pain.
I take notes about time flying, that is what the poems
keep discovering. Time flies. I write it down in Latin.
That settles the matter till I take another walk
and the sky builds up again, and Pernod light trickles down among the boughs.