Volunteers

Light revolves us; we have circled
Hidden suns circling a larger one
Back to this beginning place.
Can it already be our first day?

For you, I pulled back thick curtains
On shame-lights making lace of me.
In my lonely white-rooted darkness,
You touched the lace and dreamed.

Limping, porous too, you packed that house.
We buried labeled boxes in the earth.
Homeless, we became a little mountain,
A long drive, fire and water, couriers.

Now a wide plain, we meadowlark the sky.
My old perennials root some other lawn:
That once-bed of my children’s paradise,
That hard packed marriage and divorce,

Sweet garden of my lonely manhood! Once a girl,
Rilke knew that sky-wrought solitude,
The oneness of austere androgyny. I cried too.
But from him I depart that mystic heroism.

I am no manly woman, you, no woman-man
Nor Rilke’s mirror, but tilled space, broken large.
Here shines not the dupe but multiplicity of our hearts,
Cast in cosmic arcs, sour manure where we grow.

My love, this has been a year of sprouting up.
Our new bed resolves the soil. Love springs
Through what wilted yellow-dry, now mulch.
Some volunteers we keep, some, plough.

The old barn fell for light to fall again on ground.
Forgotten beds untilled for years: they give.
The earth slow turns, and we are turning earth.
Seeds in hand, the garden waits, roughed in.

2014