Fall

Each night, the same dream: I’m an odd Victorian mansion

in a field of wheat. And I’m either waiting for the field

to catch fire or the hearse of love to pull up to the manse.

Don’t wake me. In daylight, my mother talks of brideliness

as a measure of time: in a kind of flower, a narrative of ascension.

I intimate some sort of border is being discussed,

but I can’t concentrate for the sake of all the beautiful things

claiming my attentions in the tawny fields.

There, a blankness without meanness, such as one finds

in a naked sea with all its fundamental majesty.

“Fall” is from The Wilderness (W.W. Norton, 2014).