for Wes McNair
This is not a poem, yet Just one form gratitude Can take A little tip of the heart as Though it were a hat Some visible gesture You might recognize Perhaps the heart has Many languages Mist on a morning lake Muting the low lullaby Of a lone loon or The bent red back Of the two colored bolete Raising its upright masculine Dance of death and life. Whose heart is this anyway? When I hear the loon When I bend to the mushroom Whose heart is beating? Clearly I am not alone. They too are lonely For better company A tip of the heart Now and then Some ancient gesture Of the hips and hands Bodies still in love Beyond their own flesh And voices creaking Open again in song When the power runs Out of AirPods Under unmoving hats. The language I’d forgotten Came to me in the Pauses and spaces Around the words The gesture you Recognized and shared With us all. Long ago, when the mills razed The beeches and oaks, when The red and yellow boletes ceased Their fertile dance and the Beating between us all grew Quiet, Keats made a mushroom Of his rotting heart, Tipping into the clear cut Pitting words against saws As if this this might be another form of Gratitude. Now, for the revision That must follow.