The gecko, hurried by desire, hurried by an urgency

It knows so deeply it is the urgency, scuttles into

The plastic bottle left lying on the sidewalk, thin edge

Of blue all that remains against the paper’s white tear

Women run, or they walk, along the intracoastal, men

Promenade shirtless, seeming without care

The same couple as two days before, seated yards apart,

Taut with music, taut with the rhythm of the day, lean

Fishing poles into the water, flicking light against a sky

Freighted with grey

Someone passes, saying something familiar in a language

We used to know as the language of prayer

A man and a woman, young and unafraid, guide their dog

To the sidewalk and begin walking north toward that place

Heaped now with ash and cinder where once we loved

One another and a son we would never know, where a girl

Calling herself Field Without End has come another year

Closer to shedding the swaddling that has been wrapped

Tightly, ever so tightly, around her, starving her of song

Among the midden it is clear — there is no nature other than

What we make, and what we make is low and lowly, a jangle

And a discord, a blight that brings the crows to the pine,

The vultures to the circle, the oil to the surface of the rain

Speak is to
Disillusion

Tarnish not
Something gilt

Dizzying
Bacchanal

First is sun
Nor bruise

Nor

Coin

Holy
Host among
Fen whose fern
Girders sky

Eurydice
Sky

Each arch

Songing what
Gap, which voice

Until day
Light comes up
On us

Entire

A majesty

For Elodie Meadow

From the coin before the threshold,

Tarnished from your mother’s travels,

Which before weighed dull and heavy

In your tender hand, springs forth

Blake’s heavenly host

Dried flower, which you, asking of me

To stop my sight and stay, resting

In the blindness you have commanded,

Go to precisely and take from its setting,

Unfurls a field that knows no horizon

Take heed, those with thoughts

Of trespass

Here is no entry

Here a girl has made of herself

Her own sanctuary

Everywhere Croatoan

Our salvation bound to the carving, to what

Others call Mystery, because what they hear

When the coin touches the floorboard

And we raise our fingers from the flower

Is altogether other than the voice

Urging us to pursue

The hill too steep for the city

The loss too close for the grieving

The desire too wild

For the loving

The girl who stands before us decides

Her name

Field Without End

And whenever she comes among us

She is a revel of angels dancing the sun