Terroir

They have given us our lovely flavor.
The umami of our unwashed limbs
has risen through the bedrock of themselves,
the native soil and weather
they carried in their ceaseless movement.
What trace dye might show
the westward swaths, the starting and stopping,
the plume of blood, ending here.

And we find, though vanished, untraceable
their mute weight begins to bend us;
they disturb us with suggestions.
They do not come in dreams
or dressed as we might know them,
but in static, in distracted air
in the narrow stillness before sleep,
or as we sit with hot tea and blanket
and the doorbell rings;
and ignoring possible danger we open the door.
The peephole useless where three ears of corn
hang to recall past harvests,
so all that can be seen
are yellow teeth, large but amiable.
And just as we look the street door closes.
We glimpse through the glass
the back of someone who may have had
a message, or not. That’s how it often is.

But sometimes clearly, as today,
in the first snow becoming mysteriously visible
more than silent, silence incarnate,
a shifting scrim framing beyond this window
Finland a century gone
a stark farm yard and the girl
not yet my grandmother
who has left school after eight years
with fifty years of poetry in her head
and now must milk the cows whose breathing
steams the cowshed windows white.
Where she steps the mud is not quite hard.
A different stillness stops her, lifts her eyes
to the wide pale sky; she waits
and slow observable flakes
like fish scales scattered by the blade,
like salt froth on a high cold sea,
like feathers,
like fragments of white pages,
whirl one by one and drift and touch
the roof, her upturned face, the freezing earth.

Learning to fall

Take the high wire;
do not think of falling;
from the beginning, eyes forward,
do not look down.

The first step is the bridge to the next,
is the wing raised and spread
over all the moments of the act
without stop or thought,
a reel cast above the water,
skimming, weighted, alighting.

But hesitate and the foot
grows heavy. You must fall then.
Become the wing
outspread in air,
the crumpled paper smoothed
between two palms
to a creased sheet,
arms open, legs adrift,
a dry leaf sailing.
Abandon the vertical
and the net will not fail you.