Firewalk

1.

If under the full snow moon

you can keep breathing – I’ll be glad

if I’m alive tomorrow, I said

to myself driving the back roads

in yet another storm. I had never seen

such poverty – Mae stoking her stove

from six in the morning until late at night.

Kind of lonesome, don’t you know, alone,

the wind blowing and everything,she said

when I left.

                   Some notes from your silver flute,

please, to quiet my heart. Stripped of ourselves,

of who were thought we were, we can walk

on burning coals or so we’ve been told. The sea

does not part for me. I do not track

each gleam of fire. Yet in the least stroke

of my pulse I am passing

from one state to another

2.

If he came, he lungs like blown leaves, would you

take him back? Mae had asked. She had stories

could make us grieve another hundred years. In our old

feudal lives, ladies or slaves, did we need the poor

to be poor so we’d have something to do?

No Mother Teresa of the hinterland, I cannot stay

with the desolate forever. The change I ask

runs so deep I’m mostly speechless.

                                                           Today I heard

just north of here, beyond Blue Ridge, Blue Hill

Mountain, the good sisters have returned.

Once more dispensed from my vows

I’m driving 55 against frost heaves,

through narrow lanes of poplar, birch,

past the sea on my left, towards home

and you. There must be, south

southwest, some unspectacular small place

for us to thing, to feel from.