Series: Morning Porch Poems: Winter 2013-14

After the first onslaught of wind, hail the size of golf balls, we heard the radio alert. Is there a safe room beneath the stairwell? Is it large enough to contain the plants seeded at all the children’s births? We would need to loose them under the light of a yellow moon, then anchor them with ivory amulets. Nothing in the dispatches tells you how you must learn to sit still, in the dark, until the mind grows quiet: until the eerie searchlights of danger diminish into soft two-note voices and the rain can be ordinary again.

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Seed these words
in your everyday speech—

Acanthus or helichrysum;
indica, milagrosa, javanica;

perforate, constellation, for no reason
but that they introduce

a break in the aftermath of repetition.
Drone of some large, unseen motor

outside our windows every night
after midnight, bearing neither trace

of gold nor verdigris: you do not lead
to a trapdoor through which we might lower

our bodies into a waiting boat, damp seats
skimming prosaic language off our clothes

so they thin to the embroidery of chance,
texture of a different possibility.

The landscape opens like a tapestry:
under the moon, farmers roll

their cotton pantaloons and sink
toes deeper into the mud.

You would think young shoots
give off a uniform sound every time

there is a planting: o of surprise,
ah of falling and letting go,

allowing the dark to swallow
each body wanting to burst

toward the harvest,
arcing toward the stalk.

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