WHAT’S BECOME
In your absence the trees are thick with sap,
catching slugs, amber jewels for our inheritors.
The cones so thin and weak I can eat them.
Everything is strange. Where the sky once met
the garden there’s a wool of yellow smoke.
The sparrow I threw into it did not come back.
The moon will not look at me anymore.
The squirrels hang like fish over the branches
and the birds tunnel deeper into the earth.
In the kitchen: the skull of an orange,
some mites that might have been seeds;
the potatoes, damp mouths, gone to talking.
There is a chalk horse standing in the briar.
Every time he moves he is eliminated.
His ghosts go one by one into the woods.
Even now I look for you in every direction
though my eyes are opals, my hands stones.
I write you: hieroglyphs, shaken from the stem.
If you know I am waiting please come.
It’s been too long since we lived in the brick house
with its white fence and green grass and marigolds.
Maggie Dietz 2003 Writing Fellow
