SEAN PATRICK HILL

 

 

                                     



from THREAD-CLOUD ATLAS

 

 

In the sucking mud tramped
  to the sugarhouse

             pulling free
our feet you and I

music in a shed, a banjo, a fiddle, and

                          a fire
and dripping maples

I remember you well from
      a past life

 

and can see you now even as I pass
through the fire

look,      my forehead clean

 

Remember the paper wasp
nest
          on Pine Mountain

the chimney hearth suspended in air
                       where once
a floor creaked under a man and a woman
standing
after snow


We couldn't name the flowers there


                                    not yet this
surreptitious
affair of the heart



It is because I saw that paper nest a month before
on Furnace Mountain
        where I walked in the rain and sometimes

snow
to the prayer hall

and then there you were
                        walking
to your car in falling snow and failing light
       falling through snow

you turn
and the fire is no longer at my skin but in my heart

 

Say this stream that falls
over
Creation Falls

Say this—

sandbar
limestone lip and arch and rhododendron tangles
            something
            we could grip

I have photographs to prove it

                     felled pine
                                  two daughters

           Christmas

Memphis

Little wren what stitched its nest
behind the broken
            screen

we watched      two of us       and our
                          two daughters


watched an hour
                                       glide by, a sliver

of
    frozen river



When I think of you I think of a
             lithe horse
beside a pear tree or a dream of a tiger
      beneath an overpass
    and then
you crying at the coffeehouse as I told you
how it turned
             to a mountain

       lion

 

                       they say that such an animal
                                       in dreams

is a woman


                                        a woman's fire


You know you have in you
this
dream of a sugarhouse

            beside a river
                       
                        in

        spring

where
winter has no grip


a man and a woman in a nest
of air

a man and a woman
             warming
after snow

 

 

                                                                                                      

 

      

 

                                   

 

 


TYPO 21