Full

                              i

The moon is fat and orange and round.
It pops up above the clouds in the angle
between telephone wires and flag pole.
In the blue spruces across the pond, two
great horned owls hoot as they swoop,
screech when perched. Their beaks open
and close a second before the cry carries
to this side of the valley. From time
to time, their heads swivel full circle,
amber saucer eyes taking everything in.

                            ii

The moon is plump and pink and friendly.
In the pause between the rhythmic jostling
of cobbles by ocean: clicking. A flashlight
finds a porcupine in the apple tree, eating,
teeth grooves in the white flesh between claws.
Light shining in the red eyes doesn’t interrupt
his concentration. He looks in this direction
then resumes the methodical consumption
of every ripe apple within reach, moving
along the branch until hidden by leaves.

                            iii

The moon is hiding behind the house. Some
stars come out. In the yellow bedroom, under
a blue comforter, the sleeper searches the river
valley she knows by heart. Deep snow covers
the land; the roads are closed. In a round tower
living room ringed by windows, the aunt
who died a month ago is waiting to give her
tea and chocolates. In her leafy tree house
high in the sugar maples, the aunt waits.

—First published in The Marlboro Review

Blues, for Bill

How fitting that he should come back as blues,
the whole panoply from indigo to ultramarine
on two wings, as cows lumbered up the swale
 
to a hilltop pasture, the sun sunk behind the now
truly named Blue Ridge, the world in deepening
shadow. How perfect that he should come back

as a butterfly, and yet, given his love of words
and where they come from, how apt it should be
in the blues of a Red-spotted Purple, southerly

conspecific to the White Admiral she might find
in the city where they lived. This is her first summer
in this state; this is the first blue butterfly she’s

ever seen. She is wearing blue jeans. She stands
just beyond the shade of a stately Chinese elm,
watching day fade. Except for the cattle, it is

utterly quiet. The butterfly alights on her right hip
and stays, its quivering subsiding slowly to calm.
She could touch it, but doesn’t. The Incas believed

warriors fallen in battle visit loved ones left behind
as butterflies, she learns later. She knows very little
of this then. She still doesn’t know what happened

to his ashes, his cookbooks and jazz, the last message
she left. She knows where his books went, who took
in Velcro. To satisfy him she learned the difference

between twilight and dusk. She tries not to budge,
to breathe as lightly as she can. With nightfall, he lifts
off. She knows how lucky she is. How lucky she was.

—First published in Ploughshares