Brook Alder

Dried, you could see how it looked in winter
when things used their lean names,
leaves gone. The shape of alder 

was the shape of water.
With it the brook bristled.
With it they pluck out mine eyes.
Some truths were too common to forage.

Forms like:
At night there were no reflections.
Everything that happened, happened once.

Each morning
the brook flickered and crushed 
whatever looked down.

There was the shape it took 
and the space it hollowed,
muddy and restless.

The sky is littered with objects
made of feather and metal
and like other wars
there is blood and oil.

Firelight darkens
when it moves underwater.
Air is captured in glass
as in ice.

Not everything can be harvested.
In the field, 
certain roots are left in the ground.

September hovers,
sky pulled open like a rotted stitch,
skin pulled back like matted grass.

One binary: non-living and dead,
grey stone and clear water.

In some lives
green takes the form of white,

bindweed tendrils, light starved, 
under a canvas tarp.

At night there are no walls
only paths you can’t follow.

Glossy and damp, they cling to light,
geese in March at a fold in the shore.