“A free-verse poem, unrhymed, in the style of John Ashbury's early poems in "The Double Dream of Spring"”

The hour peels itself open—  
slant of sun dragging its voice  
over the patio where white chairs  
gnaw the same shadows as last year.  
I listen for carpentry in the next yard,  
a hammer’s lawless persistence,  
becoming abstract:  
boards, dust, the discontinuous afternoon.

A woman sweeps her doorway.  
It is always a woman sweeping,  
her skirt scalloping the wind,  
the harmless drift of daylight  
between rooms,  
catching in the corners  
like a child’s secret  
affirming its minor revolution.

I read the paper again—today’s news  
already yellowing around the edges,  
stories suspended in the act  
of not quite changing anything:  
a bird, whose name is not in the article,  
sings itself loose  
from the intention of branches.

You ask where the sky went—  
as if blue were a kind of tablecloth  
we could fold,  
reuse for anniversaries of simple sadness.  
(Of course there are more clouds  
than explanations.)  
I think of the way silverware  
remembers hands,  
how a vase, left under-lit,  
distills its water  
into a silence we can’t drink.

What, then, is left?  
These gestures at morning,  
the echo of soft accidents—  
footsteps blurred in new grass,  
a half-remembered promise  
that—even retracted—  
rounds out the day  
like sun fading from painted shutters.

There are other doors.  
Elsewhere, rain unbuttons itself  
on someone else's sill.  
But for now—a curtain stirs;  
the hour, unfinished as a question,  
keeps opening around us,  
each minute folded  
in a paper boat  
afloat, briefly,  
on a table of light and dust.

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