Christmas Eve
                     for Joe and Donna

Setting posts this past spring, each twist of the drill
etching rock with a metal star, I thought:
this place is finally home;
Christmas, I'll take the children to the barn ---

I was told once the animals will speak
but so very slow each syllable joins the next
and all sound becomes a steady breathing. I was told
that in the place of a breath, a lamb
could praise all creatures above and below his knowing,
and that the speech of beasts is like no other:
the tones so high, so sweet.

But on that midnight, Fm driving a back road.
I pull to the side, stop the motor,
roll down the window,
my breathing quiets. Out of silence
an owl lifts from the dense wood,
his body a shadow:
the slow hoo, hoohoo, hoo, hoo on one note
fluent as a child's deep breath in wordless sleep.

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Forsythia

From the hall I watched him shatter the orange dishes
my mother thought unbreakable--
slamming them against gray tile
as she crouched, denying milkman, mailman,
all who came to the house while he was at work,
who heard quick breaths between her words,
appraised her body.

Each night
I set the table and when it was time
we all sat down for him to lead us in grace,
careful to keep our elbows off the cloth,
careful to eat everything so he wouldn't say
how ungrateful we were for the food on our plates
and then, with his leather belt, teach us manners.
But when he smashed those dishes I ran.

It was still light so it must have been spring,
yes, May, because I crawled through wands
supple as whips but studded with blossoms
to get inside the forsythia cave.
I looked as hard as I could:
each stem was a tight green throat,
each mouth tongueless gold entered by bees
whose furry bodies spun back out
dusted with pollen, carrying nectar
in pouches on their spindly legs,
and watching them
I almost forgot the sounds inside the house
until my mother slammed the windows down
and my ears filled with buzzing.
Huddled in the damp earth beneath forsythia,
straining for silence, I watched night
billow up from the dirt, sapping the flowers.
When the crashes stopped,
she called for me; Come in. Come in.

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At the End of Winter
 

The dun-colored doe crosses the road
leaping between snow tatters. At the Citgo Station,
the boy in jeans and a tee shirt fills the tank.
Overhead a pair of geese deliberates as they fly north
and the boy glances up, says “welcome home,” as though
the birds can hear him, as though those words resonate
in small dark rooms where old women wait for just
such a young man, for geese to return, for winter’s end, for
what happens now and what happened
long ago to go on, to leap up
like their young girl hearts
when a deer outside the window,
light striking her snow tail,
disappears into the forest.

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Before
 

Everything, one might imagine, was swirling—
but there was no everything and without air, without
wind, heat, tides or intention,
nothing moved. But if nothing moved,
you must have been able to see it not moving.

 As for sound—what sound exists when void
smashes against void?  A screen door
swinging through the vacuum of what is not,
a sieve with neither holes nor sides. Perhaps
there was the slightest trace of odor—
metallic, most likely

 and the taste of a copper coin on the tongue
of a blind man. Yet, with no one to smell
the scent, connect it to memory of coins or
blind men or taste or tongue,
odor never existed after all.

 In the void that was not a void
because a void is and exists and is named,
back before creation—back or forward,
who knows, because time has no foothold
in what has never been, when none of the trees
fell silent in the woods, when no one dreamed

of nothing and everyone was, back
before death, before life, before fate and joy,
before light and dark, under and over,
in the between where everything waited,
everything wanted to be,
the small voice that no one heard
was singing up the earth.

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