Midnight Swim -- Cento

Behind the sky there’s a storm

of one snow fleck

and plunged into distant regions,

hands, woven of water and logic

spilled gradually, flooding

a typewriter on fire, like a hundred

birches dance, and they 

taste the air, the morning and the evening,

the new blue light of moon and ice

the dormant field, the snow

shiny as the coal under the railroad bridge

or a shell beneath the moving water.

The chrome surface of the dream’s lake

within a stone’s throw,

coarse salt and silver-wire hair

cut through thickening dusk

while hound dogs bark underneath

being serenaded by crickets singing the blues 

(Plenty, Offerings, Death of a Young Son, These Poems She Said, Hanlan's Point,
Sweet Like a Crow, 400: Coming Homes, Fear of Snakes, April Iceberg of Bragg's
Island, They Are Hostile Nations, Mount Vesuvius with Lips, I Have Not Lingered Long,
Dear Updike, Fire Watch, Burnt Pot Riverbank Indifferent Sky, The Suburbs,
Not the Heaven of Raccoons, the knowing.)