The sky spreads out in shades of hay:
sky adept at holding everything ruinous,
anything good.
Rockets meeting
missiles from the rooftop Tuesday night;
you called me to report you felt protected.
Only plumes of smoke, you said,
below the dome above your home. By morning
sallow
shadow on the peach and loquat ground. Sky
as smooth and mellow as a flugelhorn parade.
If one word only remained, it would have to be space.
From reverie of inner worlds to after
Afterlife—where everything is given to conjecture—
Put your proofs on this.
There’s autumn in the aftertaste
of plums. And in the troughs and companies of color
in this picture. The image
shifts by time of light: at dusk
a tree in negative space;
at dawn its limbs are facets and the company of
color broken up. Yet tree still—archetypal tree—
the brain retains this shape.
I can’t locate, in the files of my mind,
the archetype of you.
