Two by Peter Evervine!

Back from the Fields

Until nightfall my son ran in the fields,
looking for God knows what.
Flowers, perhaps. Odd birds on the wing.
Something to fill an empty spot.
Maybe a luminous angel
or a country girl with a secret dark.
He came back empty-handed,
or so I thought.

Now I find them:
thistles, goatheads,
the barbed weeds
all those with hooks or horns
the snaggle-toothed, the grinning ones
those wearing lantern jaws,
old ones in beards, leapers
in silk leggings, the multiple
pocked moons and spiny satellites, all those
with juices and saps
like the fingers of thieves
nation after nation of grasses
that dig in, that burrow, that hug winds
and grab handholds
in whatever lean place.

It's been a good day.

****************************

Aubade in Autumn

This morning, from under the floorboards

of the room in which I write,

Lawrence the handyman is singing the blues

in a soft falsetto as he works, the words

unclear, though surely one of them is love,

lugging its shadow of sadness into song.

I don’t want to think about sadness;

there’s never a lack of it.

I want to sit quietly for a while

and listen to my father making

a joyful sound unto his mirror

as he shaves—slap of razor

against the strop, the familiar rasp of his voice

singing his favorite hymn, but faint now,

coming from so far back in time:

Oh, come to the church in the wildwood . . .

my father, who had no faith, but loved

how the long, ascending syllable of wild

echoed from the walls in celebration

as the morning opened around him . . .

as now it opens around me, the light shifting

in the leaf-fall of the pear tree and across

the bedraggled back-yard roses

that I have been careless of

but brighten the air, nevertheless.

Who am I, if not one who listens

for words to stir from the silences they keep?

Love is the ground note; we cannot do

without it or the sorrow of its changes.

Come to the wildwood, love,

Oh, to the wiiildwood as the morning deepens,

and from a branch in the cedar tree a small bird

quickens his song into the blue reaches of heaven—

hey sweetie sweetie hey.

Peter Evervine