Fields of wheat,

like freshwater lakes,
draw us to their edge, call
us, as the loons' cries, in threshing waves

to sit
for the first time
under fluttering cherry leaves playing
their golden ratio overture, while we three
watch enthralled, rapt by the harvesting fire:

squiny your eyes, and see golden & green
blocks of color, as in a Diebenkorn --
but golden is a patternless quilt of

greys/greens/browns/silver/yellows/puce

stitched as in the scaly wings of a moth,
its waxy scales too iridescent

in light cascading from green waterfalls surrounding
& deciduous and piney streams
almost haloing this vale
itself haloed by the wind
which through our teeth sings --

true speech is tongueless,
inaudible in its audible
stillness, orbiting
within our bones
& in outerreaching skies
& in the echoing straw

echoing from its spiky bed
what a lone goldfinch dreams
in its full-moon flight from leaves to lilies
to wherever wherever happens to be:

“how will we fly” -- she wings --
“when breath” -- she darts -- “no longer blows us?” --

in the teeth of a wind unending
& in light from a fire
whose flames cannot burn
& by eating bread from a measureless land
ringed by waters of the momentless heart.

Frank's Land

“Eveline! Evvy!”
     -- from James Joyce's “Eveline”

Evergreen dreams dancing
to late autumn oak and beech limbs
turned -- premature birth of the sere:
red and bronze, puce and gold gone.
No barrier braves grave truth.

Home: I thought my heart
her hearth, my tongue
her tongue; ours. We two twined.

As Odysseus I, to bloom
her Nausicaan wish in fresh soil.
Her dearth undone, sullied
by light; downed.
                          She could not
climb? Would not ramp an answer? --
eyes fish-dead cry, hard ears hold,
the broken reed of her mouth
howling in its silence, faces
from a fierce ring circling her face.

In the hot sea I freeze.