background image
in plain air 149
dark below, their wrenching
tops catching the red
of a last fl are of the sunset.
No car passes. Nobody else
out here. The wind hurries
its new, clean, cold volumes of air
through the big vacancy between him
and the mountain: old elation,
come of this icy freshness
in things in their clearness,
shapes -- in the sharp air
of this one deepening dusk -- black
now and unreturning,
though a man travels
no more than a tree.
night piece
Last night I lay awake
beside my sleeping wife
at four a.m., and listened:
wind sifted through the pine tree
and made a branch tip fi nger
the roof above our bed
as if refl ectively.
Then I went in my mind
the way the wind was taking --
down through the winding canyon,
shouldering past the trees,
and onto Hendry's beach,
across the channel waters,
gaining the channel islands,
and then the open sea
and moving by itself
over the dark swells
and nothing more to seek.