Lost Text

In the distance, five deer are eating the winter
buds of young maples. Would we be better off

if we had just one more of Sophocles’ plays?
Maybe the one called Root-Cutters, about magic

herbs and resurrection. The deer look as though
they are ready to fill the chorus. Cold season

started early this year. It used to take one whole
acre of forest to heat a single farmstead through

the winter. That is where all the trees went.
Like a lost text. And the deer, however many

generations later, must still be grieving.

 

Ramps

for Orin and Sherman

Even in mid-winter, he remembers
where wild onions grow come spring. Follows
the overlapping tracks of deer and coyote
across the stream, into the grove of beeches
where snow has gathered white quires.
With their own kind of pulse, the trees draw
sap from roots to stems, push it past their stems
into the air. Rühmen, das ists. From them
he has learned why it is so difficult to praise.
Why it is necessary. To risk everything, to push aside
the weight of the earth. To shout up from the soil,
unequivocal, the one exclamation he can make. Otherwise,
he might join those who believed this world is an illusion.
La vida es sueño, as Calderón said. But in dreams,
when he touches a woman, she gives way
under the gentle pressure of his hands, wavers
with the soft rain-like murmur of a beaded curtain.
Here, what he touches pushes back. A shadow
falls from the trees. The way music falls
out of the air after a voice stops singing.