Joanna Klink

Dusk fell every night.  Things
fall.  Why should I
have been surprised.  

Before it was possible
to imagine my life
without it, the winds 

arrived, shattering air
and pulling the tree
so far back its roots,

ninety years, ripped
and sprung.  I think
as it fell it became

unknowable.  Every day
of my life now I cannot
understand.  The force

of dual winds lifting
ninety years of stillness
as if it were nothing,

as if it hadn’t held every
crow and fog, emptying
night from its branches.  

The needles fell.  The pinecones
dropped every hour
on my porch, a constant

irritation.  It is enough
that we crave objects,
that we are always

looking for a way
out of pain.  What is beyond
task and future sits right 

before us, endlessly
worthy.  I have planted
a linden, with its delicate

clean angles, on a plot
one tenth the size.  Some change
is too great. 

Somewhere there is a field,
white and quiet, where a tree
like this one stands,

made entirely of
hovering.  Nothing will
hold me up like that again.

If there is a world, let me be in it.
Let fires arise and pass.  The sky fill with evening air
then sink across the woodlots and porches,
the streams thinning to creeks.
In winter there will be creatures half-locked in ice,
storms blown through iron grates, a drug of whitest ardor.
Let the old hopes be made new.
Let stacks of clouds blacken if they have to
but never let the people in this town go hungry.
Never let them fear cold.  If there is a world,
let it not be temporary, like these vague stars.
Let us die when we must.  And spinelessness
not overtake us, and privation,
let rain bead across tangled lavender plants.
If there is a world where we feel very little,
let it not be our world.  Let worth be worth
and energy action—let blood fly up to the surface skin.
If you are fierce, if you are cynical, halfhearted, pained—
I would sit with you a while, or walk next to you,
and when we take leave of each other after so many years,
the oaks will toss their branches in wheels of wind
above us—as if it had mattered, all of it,
every second.  If there is a world.

Some feel rain.  Some feel the beetle startle
in its ghost-part when the bark
slips.  Some feel musk.  Asleep against
each other in the whiskey dark, scarcely there.
When it falls apart, some feel the moondark air
drop its motes to the patch-thick slopes of
snow.  Tiny blinkings of ice from the oak,
a boot-beat that comes and goes, the line of prayer
you can follow from the dusking wind to the snowy owl
it carries.  Some feel the sunlight
well up in blood-vessels below the skin
and wish there had been less to lose.
Knowing how it could have been, pale maples
drowsing like a second sleep above our temperaments.
Do I imagine there is any place so safe it can’t be
snapped?  Some feel the rivers shift,
blue veins through soil, as if the smokestacks were a long
dream of exhalation.  The lynx lets its paws
skim the ground in snow and showers.
The wildflowers scatter in warm tints until
the second they are plucked.  You can wait
to scrape the ankle-burrs, you can wait until Mercury
the early star underdraws the night and its blackest
districts.  And wonder.  Why others feel
through coal-thick night that deeply-colored garnet
star.  Why sparring and pins are all you have.
Why the earth cannot make its way towards you.