From Laurel
Dreamtongues
Way back in the mountains, up beyond
the barbwire snags & warnings, laurel hells
so thick & gnarled intruding flesh goes blind,
a wounded groping over frost-locked spills
of boulder, rotted leaf-mash slick as ice
on crags where Ox Creek springs fully-formed
from the mountain’s broken skull, from bitterness
& wind as keen as hunger, whiskey-warmed
I make my bed of moss as darkness drips
from twig-tips, flows on quartz-veined rock
to sluice among the moon-inflected shapes
of trees, & swelling, whelms the measured wake
I drift, past archipelagoes of dream
& stormclouds gathering black sheaves of air
tobacco-sweet & burning to relume
a piedmont town, a girl left years ago,
an arc of light translating time’s dark ore
to fluent tongues, pale leaves to psalms of snow.
Orphrey
I dreamed last night our neighborhood again:
A streetlamp glowing like memory’s axiom,
Familiar trees gone quiet, dark with rain.
As clouds recoil, a window's hard quatrain
Cracks my reflection open to a poem
I dream. At night, the neighborhood again
Unfolds, disclosing latticeworks of jasmine,
Plastic toolsheds, plots of fresh-turned loam,
Familiar trees so quiet. Dark with rain,
A rhododendron drips a silver chain
Of sound, its flower so pale beneath the dome
Of dreaming night’s last neighborhood. Again
I walk my brand-new bike where shadows stain
The grass, my fingers dreaming dew-slick chrome
And darkness, trees, & then a quiet rain
Begins, & suddenly I see her, plain
As moonlight, laughing, turning, running from
This dream of our lost neighborhood, again
So quiet, & the trees, so dark with rain.
My Father Finds Water
--Weaverville, NC, 1990
The trick’s to ask the question right he says
& plants his gnarled stick. Soon cove & orchard
tide with dusk & only ridges blaze
like ships on late November’s shore, a word
spelled out in coals. He turns, heads up the mountain;
I follow, shadowing the familiar boot––
rock-chewed, encrusted, harsh on mossy stone
& log, the slow earth’s give & taking it.
But I’m impatient, anxious, have somewhere
to be, some destiny to follow from
these fallen leaves, these worn-down hills grown dark.
He moves in circles, face gone blank with work,
with listening as if into a dream
of oceans, till he steps & stills: It’s here.