Barely discerned clouds
Hard, hard to get here
what worth, what worth
River of steel.
River of no one becoming you.
Trees that are emptier today, more forced in their forms
To focus on them is to be made glad of them in their
strangeness
The earth extrudes through them toward emptiness
The few elms dismembering
The willow’s bloom above shore like a curtaining
To focus on it is to be mostly taken into its tapes
and its filters
It is lost to the surface of this river
The dull, impenetrable, intractable surface
resisting, unetchable
Now the faint rain.
I don’t know what to do with all this waiting
things getting themselves readied toward emptiness
The scratchy, shattering elm, its crimped skin, its
exfoliating, its rivening
its being disfigured by fortune
and by wind
A crone with old frills at her hair
The grasp of her toward me