WINTER SUNSETS

Spring House

If anyone asked me what faith is,
I’d say it’s an empty cup
waiting for water that flows down
the mountain in hollow logs velvet
with lichen of many years’
clinging and into this trough
carved from hickory.
Milk never clabbers here.
Sweet nubbins never rot.
Blackberry wine keeps the first autumn chill
when I lift it out,
suddenly thirsty for something beyond
a slow trickle of water
that slackens in drought-time
to nothing. The hours I’ve sat in this corner
and scarcely breathed, keeping so still
I could hear what the earth
hears, the deepest roots
trembling. Sometimes I trembled myself,
all of one terrible day
I spent bathing my daughter’s limbs
burning with fever. For God had gone
elsewhere, the two of us left
to our last night together, the longest
of any dark. If I should bury my hands
in this water-trough, they would turn cold
as her fingers I held until morning came.
Cold as the stone they laid over her.
I made the men chisel into it,
"What the lord Taketh,
He must give back again."
Nobody understood.
Dust unto dust,
they rebuked me.
But how could I live not believing
the dust I see lifted from fields is what’s left
of her shaking her petticoat after she’d dug
the potatoes. It’s dust I’ve been told
makes the gloaming sky even now
crimson with sun so that I see this water
turn wine for the instant
I hold out my empty cup.

from Lost Soul, forthcoming