Coppice

Watching from the blinded outhouse
for laurel light to doubt its leaves
she has seen him,

his shell-touch underfoot
in flown nerves,
the path memoried

through piled recollections
of hickories.
She watches him, his absence

taut in air and shivering
like a space that once held bridges.
The light falls like centuries here,

she knows its cuts and slants: now
two men tie the flax
in bundles,

reprising mountains
and rattlings of juniper.
Another year’s horizon

in dropped opaline, purple blue
pulping rich as blubber
or Incan snow.

So it is deferred, then.
The wind purls,
the sweetness dries,

the taste of firesmoke.
Heatless, it carries airs
of further acres, but she knows

something like a pyre must gather
the seven gazes hung flickering
in drop-light, always

the same crowd, coppiced
and cutting witness marks
into new wood,

wrapped in rubbed lace and numb
by herder's phrase
and welder's flash. Gone

with morning, and him
always stubborn
for the last silence. Tarrying,

half-right in quickening sun
like the last time
she saw him for seeing,

when autumn set heavy
and he first taught her
of landfall