from THREAD-CLOUD ATLAS
In the
sucking mud tramped
to the sugarhouse
pulling
free
our feet you and I
music in a shed, a banjo, a
fiddle, and
a
fire
and dripping maples
I remember you well from
a past life
and can see you now even as I
pass
through the fire
look,
my forehead clean
Remember the paper wasp
nest
on Pine Mountain
the chimney hearth suspended
in air
where once
a floor creaked under a man and a woman
standing
after snow
We couldn't name the flowers there
not yet this
surreptitious
affair of the heart
It is because I saw that paper nest a month before
on Furnace Mountain
where I walked in the rain
and sometimes
snow
to the prayer hall
and then there you were
walking
to your car in falling snow and failing light
falling through snow
you turn
and the fire is no longer at my skin but in my heart
Say this stream that falls
over
Creation Falls
Say this—
sandbar
limestone lip and arch and rhododendron tangles
something
we
could grip
I have photographs to prove it
felled pine
two
daughters
Christmas
Memphis
Little wren what stitched its
nest
behind the broken
screen
we
watched two of us
and our
two daughters
watched an hour
glide
by, a sliver
of
frozen river
When I think of you I think of a
lithe horse
beside a pear tree or a dream of a tiger
beneath an overpass
and then
you crying at the coffeehouse as I told you
how it turned
to
a mountain
lion
they
say that such an animal
in dreams
is a woman
a woman's fire
You know you have in you
this
dream of a sugarhouse
beside
a river
in
spring
where
winter has no grip
a man and a woman in a nest
of air
a man and a woman
warming
after snow
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