At dusk it takes you by surprise, a turn into a garden that
you have never seen, and under trees the sound of rain that falls
slowly, playing against the leaves and touching water, rain but not
rain, a simple fountain giving droplets of water to the air,
the hovering trees, a pool at its feet where water echoes on the stone.
Everything seems to rest here, resting in the still fall
of water, an atom that contains a certain music, you, the stone

surrounding silence—time that seems to turn upon itself. You would
not dare to take a step for fear of altering the rhythms that
play upon the unknown world where you have strayed unable to
depart. Death is not noticed here, unless it is in inside the hollow
echo of the stones, of absence, sadness, a bird in darkness calling,
the notes barely heard and falling through your mind as any small
rain might fall, the traces that it leaves invisible but sure.

Frieze

It was a season cut from glass, of cautious birds, evening that
pauses in patches in the trees as if composed of memories
barely visible, and each fallen from a labyrinth
of stories to linger briefly here before the rising of the stars.
You see the thinness of it, its fragility, your eyes unsure
if all of it, the birds and stars, might have been spoken of in spells,
of spells adrift from larger tales and all unable to depart,

a season that has no way out and open in us like a frieze
where we begin to see ourselves in low relief, so delicate
that you might think that you are leaves of willows that have just begun
to give their softest green to air, and if a goddess were to be
needed, then this green were she, etched beside us in the air,
a melody of birds woven soundlessly into her hair,
all of us the merest echoes of a script without trace.

Moonlight

Voices of children playing in the street rise up and float into
the window where you sit, the beauty of it seizing you as if
someone gripped your throat, your one desire to lift them in your arms,
embracing them forever, not the little bodies, which will grow old
soon enough, but just the voices, as elusive as a wild
stream that in the spring begins to stumble over rocks, and then
you think your heart will break, and unresisting that is what it does,

the fragments of it floating through the window and away from you
beyond your grasp, despite the empty gestures of your hands, appeals
of the mind in silence, mingling with the voices of the children,
silence, ostinatos they might hear perhaps to dance against,
among them yours and mine perhaps, a certain sadness that pervades
the light of afternoon, all that one desires most a gift
of bodies, bodies that shed their evanescence, a moonlight given up.

Pool

The night my father died, the stars emerged and gave the sky its shape,
moving slowly from east to west until horizons took them and
they disappeared, the silence of their passage falling over all
of us as if it were a passing of an early snow that drifts
but briefly through the dark. If we spoke, it was in passing, an
opening of silence, a little spring that surfaced from the ground
and fell away, the grass around it bending momentarily

toward the water never seen before. If that is what you were,
moving in the briefest of springs and passing on as water does,
your silence must have been the silence of a stream invisible
whose passage lies beneath the ground, rising beyond sight to form
a pool and then depart, a pool where frogs rise up and sing throughout
the night, as if they were the bearers of a message that cannot
be known, but passed alone between themselves and the reflected stars.

Weeping

Weeping is a music that is composed of oboes and the fine
rain that falls on distant hills, muted but with echoes of
poplar leaves that hold it briefly before giving it up, the sound
departure makes, unable to resist, an eternity
of going away that enters everything that hears it–seasons, chairs,
the moon–and standing in an old house, there’s no running from
its rising from the walls, its dust invisible that settles on

your flesh without your feeling it. Weeping is a music that
exhales, coming over one as autumn mist that rises in
a valley, trees becoming ghosts, the ripple of the stream absorbed
but heard as weeping’s only rhythm, breath the soul of weeping’s cry,
the music that it makes drawn in, its waxing and its waning a
giving and a taking of the world, the stars that were so far
now brushing against our skin as if their sky had always been just there.