John Ciardi
A Walk Down A Mountainside
By pothole water down a seam of time
I walked away from Tuesday. Through my mind
a flap of crows tore from the roof of pine
like tarpaper from a shack in a high wind.
A blue hole in a green flame, like a lens,
picked out a cloud. I stood and watched a drift
out of all focus. Like a secret sense,
a squirrel jangled in the nervous lift
of the leaf-net that something wrong was there.
A blue-jay squawked, "It's true!" and blurred away.
That was the last sound but the water's lain
long rush through time – a holding silver-gray
and quartz-lit sough, like silence drawing breath
in the age between two stars. Locked out, alone,
and with nothing to listen to but the nothing said
by water going, I threw in a stone
the size of a brain to make one deliberate sound
of one weighed thing in the anchorless drift. And restored
to my own humor and gravity, I walked out
from time to Tuesday, satisfied and ignored.
John Ciardi, Stations of the Air, BkMk Press, 1993.