Walking Through Fog:

           Once when the house was dark and silent, asleep, I woke
to Susan in the bathroom door, naked and giving back streetlight,
dream-sigh, the midnight voice of grass

           and it shook me bodily and straight down as if the walls
had been blown-though, sea-sifted  and the air palpable

           with trillium reaching across the lawn, dew-cold, and salted
with the salt of the body, alive and shivering  with the last breath held
in the lungs of the last wild elk in North America,

           with the stretch and creak of the barked sapling, livid

           with our worst fears of heaven

           where one might walk forever in silence over open ground: arms outstretched exactly like this:

           like some blind  bird of prey:

           some searchlight searching for decades over flat, black water:

           surge, and urge, and seethe

           Dearest,

           I have seen the light slowly shatter through the hallways and the highways with all the roads and roadsigns, and the calls of birds, and walked on anyway anywhere, with the empty stare of the walker in the fog, driven only by fear, hunger, and the body-glow of memory

           there is no more distance than this:

           no more touching than this:

           the eagle feeling for the first time in his feathers in his wings,

           a slight disturbance in the depths

           in the air