Winter Journal: The Sky Is the Lost Orpheum

The shelter of it carved, caved

Across the river, the park and the little Ferris wheel

closed down

The great oaks emptying, russet, gusseted

the hovering slant light leaking from the outer edge

of cloud bed

leads and shawls pulled forth

Thy synchrony of the lost elements recovered

the shivering water surfaces, planar unmeldings, remeldings,

riverine alchemies, unlocketed selves

now the reemergence, the sun pouring global gold

uptilted, gobleted, incanted

Am I not as God made me but stranger?

Made stranger still by what I have seen

at this hour of earth untended, unministered—

light caught up in the river’s grooved tread

That sun more like a mass grope out of emptiness

and the black river weeds before it, torn and trained,

rocketed and stark and stuck-to

The tall shadow of the willow grows forth

And the spare stems of the grasses and the rods of the mullein

And these are the stations of this river

The houses and the boats and the parked cars

The growing wedge the ducks make moving forward, the shape

of the element there among the weeds that jut forward,

the mass of the willows growing deeper in green and sundering

The backfall of sun going downward

The surface of the river coming clear of its own admixture

The ducks moving over like slow planes in formation,

barely seen needles hauling white threads,

secretly heeding

The fish in my skin relinquishes

Will I know then what I have become?

The river darkens from its end of trees closing in

There is the sun and this deep depression

Exiting as viewed in this river

Source: The Keep (University of Iowa Press, 2001)