You Are My Thou

Tonight my friend

What secret idiom

Allows us to speak?

O divine April

Shall I tell you how

A three-day rainstorm  

Loitered like an angry drunk

All over Vicksburg Mississippi?

Maybe you’d like to know

The fields today were lulled in gray-

Light heavy silent clouds

Shadows no longer reached and green

Woke and stretched to be seen

All that to make heat wait

Just one more day

Thank you

Patient old veteran 

Standing at summer’s baked battlement

I must admit

Among other things

It’s about time I stopped

Relying on the discretion of hyperbolic landscapes

Tonight my friend

I forswear wild descriptions of flora not

To mention timid signs and superstitions

I’m telling you a riddle

That only you can solve

Don’t you see?

I’m telling you a story

But I don’t know how it ends

Remember that sudden

Colder and brisker wind?

If only you had caught the first autumn leaf

You would not have caught that winter cold

You should listen to me

I’m telling you your truths

When you wake the first of May

Place your hands in pony dung

Then beat them three times fast

With the lid of a bread box

And you won’t get chilblains

I shit you not

My friend

Have I told you how your voice

Reverberates in the lengthened flames

What flames?

The breath within begins to grow and

Stops at the edge of your breath

What flames what flames what

Language can we speak tonight?

Last night I dreamed you standing

Among the still furnishings of your ancestors

I saw the desperate heat of your open hand

I saw you take hold of the sky

I saw the unharnessed fire of your mind

Waiting at the battlement of desire

Here

Take this hollow stone

It rattles when you shake it