The Folding In
The mind too has its autumns—the dead hours
that, windblown, gather into canceled years.
Here the failures, of nerve or desire,
accrue, cling with the cold interest of snow.
This too the season of my nightly dream
where sadness falls like a cloud of gulls
on some wreckage, some irreparable thing—
my own bones on the disastrous shore.
Yet often a brief, bright sound will wake me.
Like the oars of a boat, or the halyard’s
steady pulsing tap, it is only your rolling pin
in our kitchen of sun and flour. How so small
a thing can unroll the backing wind.
You roll a warm circle and then fold in
a corner of this the crumbling world.
