The Ax

Around us, this one of many houses’ slow, broadening

expansion into ideas about love, bushes emerging as a border,

the drive’s uneven, herringbone undulation of stone

fostering greenly weedy outcrops. The rose,

of a neighbor, sprawling; bins growing smaller and more various,

a new window not designed as a moon box. But which is.

The window admits the moon and the ax waits

for the conifers, which cast fat shadows on the walls

and rise into the clouds whose indiscipline I love.

The drone and rumble of traffic swims in and past;

in its wake regulations, differently colored lines,

notices we mean to recycle, matter-of-fact accruals

to be taken out under discriminating trees, which grow,

year on year, across the growth forecasts

you and I sit out, part of a big picture

which hangs on a word. Here is the strong trunk

and branch of our nights and years,

and the obscure hours which greenly filter light

and baffle sound; what hangs over us,

and these subsiding houses, started with a question

finding the ear of another, making its impossible offer.