From a Book of Hours

For Anne-Lise François

For you I got up to see the moon.
Say it was 4 a.m.
Say then it was 8.30
ish.
These are not natural hours
but hours of a kind, my little book of,
a little digital scannable book.
A telepathy toward.
I know you feel
what there is to feel
and oh movement.
Say it was a kind of moon
              near half. Waning.
              Phasing.
A pond is a pond is a pond
              is my pond. Ours.
Broiling in a cloud-obscured sky.
              Hyperbole.
Things are not easy.
              Litotes.
He writes things that sound
              like poems and so they are
              more or less a severe critic said
              of John Ashbery.
How to shape an hour, chart a flow.

Corbin v. corvid: whose
              etymologies win today,
              whose orthographies are rising.
Let’s follow a kingfisher down the long shore
extravagant with brush and unseen weeds
and a toppled pine baring its underside
a labyrinth of roots shocked
out of the earth.

Let’s tell time
by an unblasted mountain.
Let’s create unimagined reservoirs.
Let’s condense the air
between delicate rock ledges and drink
Dichten = Condensare.
Let’s re-condense the rain
gone air gone water in the miraculous well
in the Rajasthani desert …
Enough is enough.
Peculiar snails cling to the boulders
below the pond water
and maroon themselves in the sand.
I have never swum in the sea
off Brittany. Shadows
on the mountain are the fingertips
of clouds. They caress
the conifers, then draw away
their delicate handkerchiefs.
O the fancy, cheating elf.
Deceive me all the livelong day.

Jay, crow, kingfisher, raven
and now in the centre of the pond
below Catamount Mountain
riding low and majestic the loon.

And now in the late morning sky the same
or is it the same moon.