Gravel road, evening, the barn

In the foothills swelling with a parade

Of dancers, the scene infrequently starlit

 

By the fireflies. Atop the hill,

The draping of white lights

Along the frayed edge of the roof,

 

Far out of season, seem, I don’t know,

Right. She was a Crouton, the summer

School there called them Croutons.

 

Those hammock days buoyed us for the first

Time since she was born, for her

The first time ever. I pecked the top

 

Of her head. She cornered a bright idea

And handed me a wrapped glow stick. Sudden

Light lambent in unremembered space,

 

We leaned in until our faces surfaced, alien.

Now, here, I find the square root

Of negative one, the whisper

 

Of crow’s dust, God’s eyesight,

Skin’s slick preocular gleam:

A colorlessness bent, tail-winged,

 

And appled. I see her face cleaned

With the lights-out outline

Of a black gum’s red leaves,

 

Silver tipped, reflecting the moon’s disentangled reticulum.

As minutes deepen

A presence made visible by afterglow

 

Replaces the calcium light.

Like the snap of winter’s branches,

Or the way memory loses a memory.

 

Today, empty of wind or snow,

The memory lost recovered, then lost again,

Fills with the daggers of barn swallows.