The Wilds

Mark Levine

Ontario

Beauty in its winter slippers
approached us by degrees
on the gravel path. We were
hitching a ride out; had been hitching.
Our suitcase freighted with a few
gardening tools lifted from the shed
while the old man, old enough,
looked away. He who
went fishing at night (so he said)
carrying in his pail
a nest of tiny flame.

We were headed, headed out, we
were going in a direction.
No tricks
or intrigue, just a noisy
ineptness.

If that's a word. Beauty, dipped
in resin beneath its shag,
was always ready with the right
curse to recite to
our nature. It is
in us, it is,
in the smokehouse in the woods and the old man
looked away. Song of
experience.

There were treads in the snow.
We waited for our hitch.
There were train tracks which
stung with clods of this region's
rare clay.

We were boys, boyish, almost girls.
Left alone on the roof, we would have dwindled.
Incrimination called to us
from the city and its fog-blacked lake,

called to us from the salvaged farms beyond the lake,
from the wilds beyond that.
Guilty was good.

Quarry

The patient climbs down his sinkhole
hand over hand, impatient. Look. No hands.

Nor fingernails, nor
maternal lamentation, which has been cut
from the composite. On his doorstep
the milk crate, old garments shielding
from sight a delivery a
guise.

It's about price. For if the
fenced-off quarry, drenched in oxidation's
hundred hues, is a negation . . .

Nightbirds roost on its ledges.
Fox has been seen there. Families
roll their used-up animals down
to its chalky pond, whence issues,
in time, the sound of the sound of a ping.

I am after that echo which he
has produced. It is a dense
thing, water soluble.
It can, for a moment, be got out.
My guide: don't back off.

Bering Strait

Judging a man by
his state-issued shoes
in all latitudes cut just below the knee
seeming to float as the sky floats
over the tundra
a scab of lichen hugging the black rock

lyric
repeating itself in him he stitches his kite
to the updraft for wings and the sea
rears beneath its lid of misshapen ice
toward a magnetic limit washed
by a tide

holding on for a bit like a seeming sailor
riding a cleaved keel
lyric instructing his raft
binding a few slats squeezing
rainwater from his wool
dredging dark bony fish underneath

adrift in nutrient
rich doses of remembering
a city between two rivers
above drained wetlands besieged
in the marching song the day
crisp with transfiguration

nets rake the shoreline with him
threshers clear the field with him
unmindful of the carbon beds
his heels sticky with sighting land
his refrain the
hero's need to be unloved.