Spirits of the place who were here before I saw it

to whom I have made such offerings as I have known how to make

wanting from the first to approach you with recognition

bringing for your swept ridge trees lining the wind with seedlings

that have grown now to become these long wings in chorus

where the birds assemble and settle their flying lives

you have taught me without meaning and have lifted me up

without talk or promise and again and again reappeared to me

unmistakable and changing and unpronounceable as a face

dust of the time a day in late spring after the silk of rain

had fallen softly through the night and after the green morning

the afternoon floating brushed with gold and then the sounds

of machines erupting across the valley and elbowing up the slopes

pushing themselves forward to occupy you to be more of you

who remain the untouched silence through which they are passing

I try to hear you remembering that we are not separate

to find you who cannot be lost or elsewhere or incomplete

nature of the solitary machine coming into the story

from the minds that conceived you and the hands that first conjured up

the phantom of you in fine lines on the drawing board

you for whom function is all the good that exists

you to whom I have come with nothing but purpose

a purpose of my own as though it was something we shared

you that were pried from the earth without anyone

consulting you and were carried off burned beaten metamorphosed

according to plans and lives to which you owed nothing

let us be at peace with each other let peace be what is between us

and you now single vanished part of my left hand bit of bone finger end index

who began with me in the dark that was already my mother

you who touched whatever I could touch of the beginning

and were how I touched and who remembered the sense of it

when I thought I had forgotten it you in whom it waited

under your only map of one untrodden mountain

you who did as well as we could through all the hours at the piano

and who helped undo the bras and found our way to the treasure

and who held the fruit and the pages and knew how to button

my right cuff and to wash my left ear and had taken in

heart beats of birds and beloved faces and hair by day and by night

fur of dogs ears of horses tongues and the latches of doors

so that I still feel them clearly long after they are gone

and water beside the boat one evening of an ancient summer

and the vibration of a string over which the bow was moving

as though the sound of the note were still playing

and the hand of my wife found in the shallows of waking

you who in a flicker of my inattention

signalled to me once only my error telling me

of the sudden blow from the side so that I looked down

to see not you any longer but instead a mouth

full of blood calling after you who had already gone gone

gone ahead into what I cannot know or reach or touch

leaving in your place only the cloud of pain rising

into the day filling the light possessing every sound

becoming the single color and taste and direction

yet as the pain recedes and the moment of it

you remain with me even in the missing of you

small boat moving before me on the current under the daylight

whatever you had touched and had known and took with you

is with me now as you are when you are already there

unseen part of me reminding me warning me

pointing to what I cannot see never letting me forget

you are my own speaking only to me going with me

all the rest of the way telling me what is still here