David McAleavey 

 Written next to a page of Emerson

You should empower all the voices, since
what is strong enough makes a pattern of itself.
The sound of a line can make the next line easy.

Or thought can: further down you’ll find
clear streams connecting unfathomed blanks.
Deeper still are the big rivers that make

the ground quake, the air chill and quick.
The landscape is glorious even if the music is
Unfamiliar. It makes the brave shiver.

Think about it: what do you care if you’re lost?
Wouldn’t you really rather hear the music? This
is after all the plot of earth where

those of us who think talk of music
can be music
talk.

Arriving lost

you work in the garden, you work hard all spring, come
summer you start harvesting. what do you harvest? you
harvest spices tasting like foam, indigestible peppers
with pearly husks, banana-shaped tomatoes filled with

one big seed. there is no one to turn to for help.
the plants in the garden have done all they can, executing
perfectly commands it seems you must have given. dig
into the soil:    is it real?    yes, it is real.    the scraps

of plastic you neglected, letting them stay in the
compost heap, are still there, inhumanly slow at decom-
posing, tho now brown & brittle. is this mutation what
you were raised to fear? under your fingers the grapes

have turned to jade. your skin toughens into parchment.
silence. you hear bones clatter. you wish: castanets.

What it felt like

what it felt like, being the father of a new son,
coming home to a woman I barely remembered, a town
abandoned long ago? well it was pretty peaceful: I was
tumbleweed roughed up against barbed wire, I was dust

sifting. horned toads snuck around the foundations, &
the wind tried to remember something about winter, about
cold, and I was the wind, silent inside & calm.

had I been acting a melancholy scene in a tragic western,
sure of myself in the role I had, well-paid & well-tanned,
I couldn’t have been more at ease. that’s what it felt like

when I was told I was the son of this prairie desert, she
was my mother, my life had begun; & incidentally, life has
begun to shine at the threadbare places: maybe beyond
another version like a river is gleaming dimly along.