Upper Regions

the few houses here
would be best told elsewhere,
in a clearer, more distant way
of remembering.

after the calendar’s grid
blends into weeks and months
to come, then the window
would better allow the brightness,
the grey to blue to dull yellow of dawn
settling across the sawdust
that muffles the basement steps—
this house built in the middle of nowhere
pictured more purely once nowhere is familiar.

we can picture the Christmas tree standing
once it has already stood—perhaps
by the fireplace now difficult to light,
or near the children, now only a murmur
carrying forward into time standing still,
into the gust of a flame unignited.

looking out of the window
at the dirt splayed by tire-tracks
and the cloudy blue that meets it low
is to stand on a fault line,
feeling the world split
as the eyes press out of ignorance
into the passing of clouds
that hover here and there, mix,
and recess into the chasm
that defies sight.