Elegy

You’re still waiting for charms against night

and lostness. I know the song of the wood thrush,

stitch of the clock. I know latchkey and outskirts

are just different ways of going home. Willow, milkweed,

the sewer grate where the wasps rose up

like fevered prayers. The pages of books

to shelter between. I’ve been remembering you

as I sing my flatland girl to sleep—ee-oh-lay

ee-oh-lay—just so she’ll know there were songs. I lie.

I say the flood was only a dream, the wild beast

prowls only in the hills. Her cheek

is a wing on my passerine heart. My heart,

its fondness for perch and undergrowth, scatter

of last year’s winds. I won’t speak

of Orion, how holes in his belt outshine

our sun, or his shoulder waiting to spill

its terrible light in our daytime sky.

And if the house should shake

with the gait of a transient earth,

if drought should snag

my voice in the wandering

moment of sleep falling down. Girl I was,

to your shirtless, half-boy, August afternoons.

Go to your footpath, your hill of shade.

And if your feet lose their way, watch out

for spindle and kiss, the time the match burned

down to your hand. And if you look to me

for assurances from a future map,

all I can say is I haven’t yet told you all I know

of winter, the bruise

of late fruit, and all these books still split

open in my hands.