Origins

The day deepens to navy
and my eyes in the window
stare back, and my hands
wrap themselves around a cup -
by now I should know
the quality of silence, the intervocalic
thrust that aspirates a breath,
but no vocal chord vibrates the air
and corms in the inner ear
unstirring, wait to hear
a word, a sigh, a pleasantry
a cough, a laugh, the summing-up
of another day all quiet and blue
all wrapped up like a Yuletide
gift to undo.
But the stare is blank, a pitched accent,
a reducing grade of vowel,
a quantity apart from the normal
place of hearth and home, all food and coal,
all warm - here the quality of air 
is zero-grade, all fade
and truss, of missing much.
A single root still grips the soil,
engenders more by thought alone these
days than pushing up to sun -
a fibrous thing, rank and overrun,
all brown growth runs back along
undone and seeping with the rain
back to where it came
to thin black veins of grainy
soil waiting to be dug.
A plane drifts overhead -
(underneath, all buds are snug
and fat, well-fed) -
drifts in clouds so blue they make me
scared such space is hanging there -
such flights of mind are dangerous -
and some are bitten by the frost, deformed
and black and some are dead,
some can't run back -
too many zeros, the source is closed,
too much lack hardens the arterial
rush to the head,
too much growth, too overfed,
the pink buds burst
and red runs down the stems,
capitulates with rain, articulates
and stains the black soil pink again,
a running back and in and through

to the origin of gain -
that tiny thing that split its
sides, that fostered pain
as storm clouds gathered
over Capricorn, the birth chart
worn with too much handling
and in the grains of soil
the Sages sprinkle mistletoe
and sing
as they watch the day deepening,
their navy faces upturned, anxiously
they scan the lowering blue,
hope for sun on the morrow,
food of rain and sun enough
to make their one plant grow.

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