I.

It is mid-August, and the dust and fire smoke
give way to rain, not for an afternoon,
but for two long and otherworldly weeks:
verdant, English, biblical.

Out through the wide double doors
the rains lay the ash leaves flat,
the road is black, and clouds rise
from the ragged folds of mountainsides.

Even in the mountains
the world sums
to flat, fields and fences average out, the scrawl
of rocks, the phone lines’ gentle catenary.

In all of this a woman laughs on her phone,
standing under a juniper, in the lines of rain.


II.

Letters grow like fruit,
pendant and discrete, and words
form without syntax, just color
or scent without context.

When vowels fall, they drop quick,
striking the ground and rolling
among the incomprehensible blades of grass.
Still, sense remains, up in the branches.

When consonants split, the whole tree shakes,
and creaks, and shoots curt clicks, the old wood
checks and the new wood breaks.
And then wind uncreates.

In the stream beside the tree
the letters rattle and collect.
Languages come to be and pass,
and there is something else, something too small to see:

The dappled shadows move, signs
coalesce and disperse,
a broken day, delayed
eternity, fragile gestalt,
hidden idea-of, dark shuttling

manifold forms—though thrown
by letters they almost seem alive,
and so believe themselves the cause
of whole unfallen sentences.


III.

The streetlight holds a world of snow,
whole genus of pictographic script,
and though each flake participates in soundlessness
somehow the gist comes clear.


IV.

Vines on the porch swell at the bud scar.
A ladybug crawling on the glass.
The pertinence of pleasing things
does not last.
 
In the dry garden
new snow creates a page
under old writing.