In the Ghost-House Acquainted

I close the simple flowers
and bid the moon now rise
for Death is not my harbor.
And I walk among derelict combines
that they might know
and come unafraid.
In mulberry small birds sleep.
Hornets enter one by one the districts
of their hidden city.
A fence dissolves. Reappears.
Oaks lean into the darkness,
into the light
bedded in a ditch.
That the chorus preserve us
as frost presses down
with equal weight and tenor.
That shadows breathe of their own
existence. That this heart
not fail. And these hands.
And those hands. That the moon move
and the earth move
as it was in the beginning.
I remember the alfalfa
and stacks of hewn wood—
as I remember that world
pouring into this.

Kevin Goodan
In the Ghost-House Acquainted is reprinted from In The Ghost-House Acquainted (Alice James Books, 2004).