Two Poems
The Doctor Asks My Friend to Follow the Light at the End of Her Pen
Just past daylight the first morning of deer season, the fingers on his left hand go numb. The second time he passes out we’re still half a mile from the truck. He’s a large man and takes up most of the backseat where I’ve covered him in old newspapers and blankets. At the hospital, he opens his eyes to what he describes as a fence of bones: head at rest in the deer’s chest. At 84 his grandmother’s stroke pinned her to the bed. She said ginseng grew in clusters around her feet and she needed to dig the root to heal. Of all of us on the mountain, he’s the best tracker. I’ve seen him get on all fours and follow a trail into a thicket of multiflora rose. As his eyes track the pen, a heron glides above a thin line of shinning water. He smells spoiled eggs and thinks of the swamp where he saw the largest snapping turtle of his life bury itself beneath a log. The gray bird slowly beats its wings toward the horizon while the monitor hooked to his arm buzzes like a woodcock. The doctor’s pen moves back and forth. My friend’s eyes stay snagged on a branch.
The Book that Opens with Night
You translated
the hooved path
into and out of
memory.
How to read
the snow, the river’s
current, the wind
in the chestnut oaks
that refuses
to turn away.
What is this nest
I’ve made
of your death,
a rank and wild
scent carried
to the ground?
You neglected
to teach me
a new language
for your absence.
Yesterday
a vireo sang
a noun
that reminded me
of how
last year’s
beech leaves
hang on
into the first
warm days
of spring.
But what does
the wood frog’s
verb mean
as its voice
careens
the raspberry
dusk?
When five
planets align
we understand
the raven’s
emphatic
protest.
More than three
hundred languages
have been lost
among willow
and alder
branches.
I’ll ask again
for a way
to change
words
into a fox
sly enough
to disappear
into the pages
of the book
that opens
with night.
