Bud
Along the light-tipped Norway maple’s twigs
leaf folded into beads of magenta-washed rust,
black now as the sun rises behind winter cloud
a sky of buttery cream. Light enters this room
like an intimate, like it is at home here. Like I’ve
given it a key, so it can come and go as it pleases,
glistering the shelves with its solstice slant, then
suddenly cold, withdrawing into winter, taking
light and shadow with it. This is when the buds
look brave. They can take this coming and going
alterations of warm and cold. They can outlast it.
Their green is under stilled tongues. So Basho
tucked a haiku into his hat’s brim as he set out
on his last journey. Pascal’s valet found green
epiphanies sewn into his dead master’s vest. So.
Skilled Nursing
An old man walks along the path so slowly
he might be made of glue. He looks down,
a habit I have taken up myself. So many ways
to fall down, to break something, to not get
well, to not be the same. It doesn’t look like
a good thing, this walking slower and slower.
A new physics should announce itself, all string
and black hole, where this man’s slow swim
makes sense, space and time curling up, reflexively,
into Parkinsonian lock, while this old man
keeps moving, the whorl at the nape of his neck
the same his mother kissed as he bent over first
foods, the work of the spoon so hard. Little one,
how difficult it is to lift each food to our mouths.