the copper's bronzed atop the tips of the white
pine grove again. and behind a cloud of rippled
batting, that if you were to open the rubbed
and rubbed seams in the family heirlooms
you'd see into the gray waves such stuff
as old squares have kept sewn and mem-
orable and ever moving like flesh and bones
in all it's stages of sleep: needing warm,
needing to be free of warm, needing
the between the sheets evening of ligatures
at ease at being Eve or Adam or one
or two bums who've come to take in wrinkles
or mussels in some saltwater cove and only
at low water every wig-rigged rock a
bladderwrack patch of flattened capacity
and then puffed up against the pull and slack.
when the sky at last penetrates the attic
window and wakes him there, it's no
mystery that the first thing he touches
is the thinning corduroy of his coat
she'd sewn and taken in and let out
like a stray who has her reasons for leaving
and now it's beneath his knee
at night sometimes when the wind
isn't up enough from the river to give
relief. she'd made every piece breathable
and believable, I mean, think of it:
you can read a quilt the same way
you read a book the same way
you read a recipe the same way
you read the land before you start
putting your time in. which, like an empty
bed, like a cold pipe come morning,
are fields left fallow in winter
to slump under their own self--she'd
taken all that into her lap
where eventually it made him
infant to boy to man
sleep the sleep any day's great
reckoning can afford, or sleep
the sleep a sea sleeps beneath
the sheathing and unsheathing
shade/blades of boat and bark
bottoms, or of clouds skirting
the surface so silently they move
nothing or everything, you choose:
the pinch, thumb and finger, with
a needle, the grip, fist over fist,
of a hoe handle and work-
thinning blade or a brier wild
in its own desire to flower
and root and tangle boots and make
to come loose the hemmed threads
of rovers day to day to day on their way
to the grave.
