Misericordia

 

Misericordia 

 

Gates of Mercy, stop breaking down.

 

                                    Charles Wright

                                    ARS POETICA III

 

The visible, vulnerable—a season & a season

& halfway into a season.  Of making leaves.  Of making.  Leaves. 

When the rain is finished falling, & the wind

 

that catches all that has been falling in it

and has been moved

on, when the field seems still as it's ever been

 

from this distance.  The small copse

of white pine.  & a ways off: the becoming

bare sugar maple, her leaves are who

 

knows where.  We can see the bare beaver

lodge now.  All summer it was being

composed behind the pond grasses, the sumac, the purple

 

pickerel weed, the slow geese & easy-

to- spook- wood duck.  Lone heron.  Flown

now, most of them.  When they fall

 

from the sky, or seem to, feet first,

it’s not unlike a leaf, right, their falling?  All that

time in flight & then below them 

the reflecting beholder, beholding.