Downward
Cold rain paves the path
with gold leaves, calls
to mind the future:
fall of snow. Must
every bright thing
fall, all wither, freeze,
erase our swept paths,
our steps?
How to become
like the earth,
that feels a fall
as a drawing down,
the way a lover’s face
is drawn down? How
to get that unjudging appetite—
inward, inward—dust,
petals, bedsprings,
water silvered with oil?
Come: the stinking grizzled
man carrying a plank,
the sixteen-year-old
stricken in the stadium,
millions of thistle seeds,
sparrows, meteorites.
…to draw the sun a little
and the moon much.