Notes No. 2

The pallid shutting of a night rain,
it twists with the cotton threads and
the hard panned wind, as insomnia

up into the new daylight appearance
rising first in only a more useless
cloud bank of down sodden charcoal.

Dust marred in the hand. Continuance
of matters beneath the hidden fresh
open slats of sky. An opaque balm

from the historic and future condensed
with the pause of waiting, the unlined
space of what’s then there between

and where always returned. A bridged quest
or ruffly sketched, sifting into accumulations
of curves that go protectively backward

while also the pulsing pull of the rivers,
within the fleet streams and handled
again with the delicacy of beginning.