at most a makeshift hut to receive the music

—Rainer Maria Rilke

Winter before dawn. I emerge from the pines.

Not the highway light you drive through,

not midday’s omniscient beam but the half-shuttered

canyon I knew so well this time of year.

Like coming upon an emptied house of one deceased.

The front door has shrunken. No need for a key.

The white plaster walls are smooth and cold as the bark

of aspen, the ceiling spliting at its seams.

No fire blazes, as it once had, no running water

or kettle steam. Wind taps its fingers against the glass.

I go to the windows—something was always there—

move to the treetops, searching

for the solitaires, the black-capped chickadees, the birds

who stay. Gone forever: my favorite places,

years on my grandparents’ farm. Even my childhood

houses are fading, my parents’ punched-in doors.

Necessary, but now totally replaceable.

Did I betray my life by leaving it? Red wool blankets

once covered this stripped bed. A lover slept

next to me. We entered the morning quiet as the dust.

Are you amazed at how far I traveled, how frugal

I lived? A wooden table in the living room,

a few paintings by friends. Shelter: I have never needed

very much. The sun touches the pine boughs

as if with kindness, and new snow shimmers down.

Who am I if I am voiceless? Voiceless, I am too aware

of my appearance—unprotected, genderless,

and bare as a small girl. I move through the translucent

corridors like the fish do, keeping to their lanes.

If you move too close, they dissolve, as well as the words.

Yet perhaps you have eyes only for the human.

Perhaps the two grouse, like me, are ghosts, clambering

up the flimsy limbs, too heavy for their perch.

While a third one makes its clumsy way across the snow.

Perhaps you see the world without believing I am in it.

We follow the loosely strung pearls of a necklace

flung against the sky as if out of vision,

faint at first then gaining dimension, as if they were

conjured, a magic trick unraveling from the horizon,

indecipherable scripts that hold just long enough to

be form and break apart. Terrorized by premonitions.

Our eyes are heavy from seeing. The geese lift them.

A kind of speech. We feel doomed, my brother said,

from across the country. We’re trying to keep Mother

safe. Somebody still has to go for groceries.

Last night, I dreamt the word round, as in a round table,

and then as noun: a round of poker or antibiotics or

drinks or song. Verb: to round a number to the highest.

One-hundred-thousand snow geese circle barren fields.

One-hundred-thousand people have now died of a virus.

We walk between two lakes, one still frozen. One

with open water where buffleheads dive. While overhead,

snow geese float, without seeming to flap their wings,

a fly line or ellipsis extended. A distant roar that could

be their hunger or happiness. And then it is over—

only blank sky. As if disappearance were the opposite

of infection. I mean, the blue above us seems saturated,

the bluest I have ever seen, as if sky were being cleared

of our inheritance. A blue like in the old stories

about a people who survive: my mother long enough

to die with me beside her. My brother to gain a lucky life.

Clear footpath of the goddess, lined

with travertine, a stone the color of eggshell

boiled with onion skin, and rippled glass

that we, born in the industrial age, get to see

at last—the sky unmitigated. What does it mean

to dot your i’s and cross your t’s for those

too young to write by hand ? We, in a high risk

category, fell in love on this land, cattle-

beaten juniper and the driest crumble of sage,

under a smaller sky, swirled with silver winds.

The trodden mud has hardened

after their lumbering, fractured and annealed.

The spring reaches only this far in spring.

If we never make it back to Rome—

the black-shawled women, the flower market,

the mosaics and tiles—it will be ok.

As we leap back and forth across the trickle

to avoid the gray, dead limbs, you are already

making alternate plans: what private land

to ask permission to cross, what trails within

our sphere. Village life after a lifetime of travel.

Last night, on my way to your house,

an old friend appeared at the gate, asking

silver apples of the moon, the golden apples of the sun ?

Yes, Yeats, but which poem, she wanted to know.

And maybe this is all that’s asked of us,

or all that we might ask—that the book opens to

the poem, that the mind finds its way, not

to a screen, but to a different kind of proficiency.

We grind blue seeds of juniper under our shoes.

Cow bones bleach in the creek, broken

and scattered. You say you like to revisit places,

to come back to them, over and over again.

Whoever you are with now, the news analyst says,

is who you will be with for the long term.

Glassed in behind the tempered, the beveled,

the opalescent or float glass, it is grief for the fragile

world that we wake to together. While a solitaire

sings at the tip of a tree, the song of the horned lark

is invisible to me. We are older, more careful.

A day may be lost. Instead, we remember to return:

to draperies of earth that hide in their folds

the young streams, rear flank of an animal we startle.