Wan light, weightless.
With the leaves down, the ridge
shows
through the trees, rounded and solid and trust-
worthy.Up in the mountains
in the forest, the temperatures drop
at night. In all its states, it’s the forest
that interests me
most—pine, aspen,
the wind up in them working
variously. Time there does things
like in a fairy tale,
pooling overnight and silver in the morning
like water.Walking with the dog, we find
a dead bird, a chickadee, black and white
and belly-up with little claws pulled in.
For the dead bird, time has stopped.
For most others, it goes on brightly—three nights in a row I watched the sunset
from the front window:
failure, failure, failure,
Venus and the moon above the wooded ridge.
