Winter Journal: Scratchings among the Burnings

clouds in rafts above, upon one another, pushed up along

the margin of sky

dark underbellies

Shirring of grasses and the nearly empty apple tree behind

Where is this beginning from?

The roll of clouds bolsters up close

moves vaguely east

Hear the interstate, its rush of backdrop constant

Oh those deep colors are something sacred

There are patches of olive green, chartreuse, umber, piled

against each other, snapping and smoking almost

and then the empty prongs and systems

cross-hatchings

against the grays, burnished and glowing

The cloud roll has changed now, been buffeted slowly

into bunches, disorganizing

Oh, these torches before me that seem to burn brighter

as the light fades

This aching gradation, smear and

gleam-forth and then the bare black hands up through

splaying and forcing the crowns

so slightly, just a tender worrying up from inside

the swollen gloves, the spheres of them, the undoing

the serial falling-off

Furious brocade, yes, devastation

That one oak in its torque

and above, against the maddening subtle surface of the sky

the barely defined roads upon it, the passages

the growings-forth

gobbed and wrought, rich impasto

stubborn, unbecoming

Now the grays, almost purple, seem to move forward

branching up from out of the background

darkening forth

surge from within the mass

organisms coming up against each other, bulging and turning

off, roiling

slow and mesmeric

the contained motion of it rooted

static movement, within stasis

painstaking

damage then recovery, damage then recovery

A lighter band of sky now, stratum between dark cloud and

complicated span of tree-frieze

layering, up-changing

free-needled, built-up duns and copperings

score and rose-green gore, stitch and fret

always upon the under-thing, the broad backing up over

the one

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