I drag the kitchen chair out, all the way out
                   to the exact middle of the field, new-mown.
And place myself there, primly.  I sit
                   tall
           back taunt, and tight, and straight.  I do not
                       slump
      beneath this wincingly blue October sky.

I am first chair among wind instruments, and
we are the symphony:   this openness, the trees round the rim
                                                  and I.

Today,
today we are performing expanse and hunger
             in a minor key.

I sit at the hub of the whirl — while
   all about me great patches of sound begin to tearout from here.
They arch and plummet like fierce storms upon the
      sun, and the air
      is pocked
by this full wall, falling.

The trees huddle and recoil from one another
      like whores on a streetcorner.   They are jarred
      every instant by the clanging cold. They clack and moan
                   in reedy tones.   Voices rust away into the wind.
My fingers howl like hounds running blind,
      nosing the wind — tracking the grass which uncoils mockingly
      into a hiss behind the wind.

A fly unzips the blue noise of the sky,
      that great tipped ocean hanging over us — a thawing yowl­ —
      a god’s great wound of wandering miseries and visions.
The sinuous emptiness drains down
      to the wood
and the forest, stained
   whispers and shakes
      like a disciple
             in a dream.
And it comes to trill the red wire in my bone.
Then pares itself away, punctually, like a soldier,
                                                                                like the moon.

Five rooks rise in a black, ragged shout
     and run upon the sky like a flag.
A hawk scream shutters the sky, then turns its back and flaps
    away.   There is something familiar in its claws.
It leaves the land so homeless.
And, off its haunches, from the far shore of paleness,
winter comes cracking its old bones across the sky.