These Hazy Days

Still Restless

The gnats are skimming, skating
over the clear green water
and bank grass is soft
on my feet. The day
is old and tottering,

moving gingerly
towards night. Why
am I restless?

The river is cool and its
lullaby churning and the bats
are diving down now, then arcing
up, in some sort of waltz I might,
at another time, want to learn.

Tonight, however, I've got soot
on my clothes and a broken
watch on my wrist and
the sky's a dark steel-
gray and I am
restless --

I want to drive at ninety-five
or recreate some old sculpture
in a meadow, deep in the rocks
where no one could see me. I'd
keep light locked in my chest.
I'd creep and run and sleep
and shake, like a tree I'd
bend there --

on a mountain in
eroding sand, stricken
white in frozen rest, branches
intact only by the cruel will-games
of the lightning --

that's what I'd be --

and I'd be falling too --

till I fell down the mountainside,
into the meadow of piled rocks, and
finally back to the cold riverside in the
steel-gray dusk when I longed to be else-
where, and I'd be stuck again but still oh
so restless, with still no lesson learned.