Two Poems

The Difference

In those days, fearlessness
hadn’t come to mean bravery yet, just an absence
of fear. What they called holiness could mean
the drama of reindeer stampeding
counter-clockwise in the snow – the soft fawns,
at the centre; or a thing as ordinary
as carpenters hammering timber
into house-dom, not far, but hidden,
the sound of it; a holy sound. We’re only broken, then,
I remember thinking, Not stranded and broken.
From across the room’s dark-filling meadow
the dog of change swims toward me, like it’s trying
hard to say something hard
that it cannot say.

Nightfall

Coltsfoot, for what it looks like; dandelions,
because once there were lions. Some animals
they knew by call – some, by touch. They
planted milkweed and dill, red clover, and it
worked: the bees came back. It was still
exciting, to hold a secret. Over absolute truth,
they preferred suggestion. ‘A river implies,
doesn’t prove, an ocean.’ There’s something

in me that’s brutal that I can’t make stop, though
to anyone looking I’m also anyone: showering,
after; running late for the party – still not
dressed for it; wondering aloud to myself,
This shirt, with the stain that – in the gathering
dark – seems barely noticeable, now? Or that one?