blue hour tin-scraped with cicadas my hand lifts the curtain cloth
and light spills its ghosts inside wooden bodies
a hovering of marionettes white rain dogwood blossoms
between cheat river and witcher creek, fields of abandoned furniture,
wood glazed with beeswax ruin written
we follow deactivated logging routes
to the gorge bridge sleep on confederate gravestones, bins of dead sunflowers
the old ones come to us, dragged forward by their shadows,
their voices left to creak in the kitchen pipework
they come through the ruined apple orchards, they sink,
swaying in the orchards, feet heavier, feet, bruised into rootsong
they know these are the last of days and so I take their hands, kiss them
and my hands hold dead leaves
/
moths constellate the charred roof with silences dusty stars
you adrift here, this between-ness of things and I could not reach to you.
your shadow left in the coal heap like the other gandy dancers
hills unfold to hills grey on grey
in the cotton fields, an accumulation
of absences. in the woodcutter’s forest, the rose-smoke of burning ghosts
everything dreams dissolution and there is no knowing of place
to endure there between voice and landscape is to walk your desire
is where the garden of the real might blossom whole moons, remedies, knowing.
you say: we will drown of false translations. water
is its own heavy meaning. tracelessness. and river-systems die out
though you walk the maple ridges for centuries
you come no closer to what is here will have no articulate word left to hold
when the first names disappeared, sight followed then the landscape
the light falling, becoming language language without tense
the coarsened linens of our bodies left soaking the aftersilence
