Movement: Out of Doors, Out of Town, In Dangerous Times

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To that lit spot ahead 
is as far as you’ll walk: 
open green, bounded by pale shrubs 
you can’t name, sky 
in clabbery cloud, light blue showing through. 
Storm coming, your father would say. 

You should run, should pound 
heaviness out through soles 
into the earth you know is anything 
but solid: tunnels of moles and mounds 
of gophers, earthworms leaving patterns 

like that early memory of crumpled yarns pulled
and scattered from Aunt Lila’s knitting bag 
across carpet of the ladies meeting room 
in that pine church your father helped build 

which is no longer there, far from here, 
and so long ago 

you can only be dazed at such an image 
weaving through fifty-odd years 
into this slow motion walk 

you had meant to run into exhaustion, into sleep
which can’t really forget 
a certainty come late that all times 
have been dangerous: 

blessing or not you hadn’t always known, 
like you didn’t know the scattered Pleiades 
and staunch Orion you’d loved since childhood 
were in the Bible 
along with burning bush and brimstone, 
angels, Armaggedon, pillar of salt, 

and pasture, the word now that calms 
as you reach the green slope, a pale drift 
of bushes turned to mounds of white petals 
snowing down . . . . 

You stand still, stand still 
as you can in slight movement of air 

and the grasses . . . 
the grasses breathe 

breathe in and out 
around you