An Ascetic Impulse Surfaces, Tears Leaves from Their Stems
       

The rains began last night, clearing the air for snow,
making the air more vulnerable and so, more accepting.
I pull the fava bean vines and lay them to mulch
in the trough, dig the purple potatoes that have scabbed.
Yesterday, I went to the mountains
to visit the wild birds, not bush sparrows or house finch
I feed here, but the delicate green flycatcher
with its white eye ring who used to land on its banisters
like a charm. Animals have made a new trail
to the water. Allowable, no longer frightened of me.
Who are they, leaving no scat, no sign,
only a cemetery-quiet, an empty, cold vault, looted
of valuables. As I have left my visionary days behind me.
Even the road I traveled is less passable.
Still an incandescent light I could not have planned for.
I used to feel omniscient as the snow.
Is there a word for layers the hay parts into when I gather
it in my arms? A word for the slump
where granite sags, a knee-buckling mud? Is there a word
for my new point of view? Surely not first-person,
nor third, not domesticated or wild, something artisanal
like the potter's clay slip, the flautist's embouchure,
the painter's palette knife, like when I dream
my own performance but am watching it from the inside.
One of three talents you might bestow upon a child.
If god is pressure, as the occultist writes,
it's a wonder anything holds up: cloud shapes, the spindle
of branches under the weight of a ruffed grouse.
It is awful to be disappointed when one has had so much.

Tweet
Copyright © 2021 Melissa Kwasny All rights reserved
from Willow Springs
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission