Transit of Venus
Last night at eight, the Earth in its orbit____________________turned and threw its shadow — the aggregateOf all our orphaned selves — over half the Orphic moon:A sack dropped over the head of a god — Siva, maybe,Mugged by love, in the sacred glade of night.And dawn today was a tungsten blaze______________________when I rose to poke my fingers in the fire's eyes:The morning the fallout from the night before, a godly light turned way downLow. And tomorrow night, Venus,_____________who's been circling slantwise in her vestmentsSince late May, has her second coming out, her first walk across the sun,That fading star, since the century before last. We live in numinous days: the EarthStepping out of her own shadow,____________________________love making a catwalk of the sun: so,How could the city not be tossed about tonight like a salad in a cyclone?Call it an East Coast Low, if you like: weather like this is the rough lovePlanets make — those gods congealed, those tales of our olden days, our wilderWays — while we, like children, watch in fright from underneath eternity's bed.
Overgrown wisteria haiku
Blue shadow of wisteria swims_______________________the open pages of my book:A perfect haiku — until I try to make it one. Beauty is howEternity speaks — hastily — in time. But you'd have to finish finishingSchool to learn to dissemble_________________with such tender, almost sexual, grace. Summer has come homeFor the holidays, and the sky's a weatherboard shack on the coast. The clouds have taken vowsAnd taken them back again in white paper bags._______________________And the truth lies, all the time,_____________________________(somewhere) between the shadow and the flower.
The drama of survival
I
The slow drama of rain on an autumnroof. The faster drama of a child's sleepbeneath it. The teleological
morality play of the landscape, onenight late in March. Here. Another momentin the slowest story in the book. Rain
II
Reads us the same story over and over,a tale in which we hardly matter, whichis why it matters so much, but no one
is listening now. Rain taught us how to speak.It taught the rivers how to run. It taughtthe fires how to stop. But no one listens
III
Slowly enough anymore. Our childrenteach us