A squirrel narrows up the garden line
and into wiry stalks of daffodils.
At winter’s end, a grey cloud lures
the treetops various: white birch ascends,
its angel-hair now darkening the sky,
fat pine leans up like a tired child
against a mother cloud, a juniper
cascades above the shed, as apple trees
are fruitless lingering; the maple slopes
down elegant but circumstantially
toward the house: tips bud up new growth.

Some scaffolding is jutting up against
the windows: scraping, banging going on,
as cups of tea passed out the back door,
paint scraped and sanded off, the ladders left,
steel poles are balancing on upper floors.
Inside, the silence (not being spoken to,
doors closed the way that children can decide
that they can’t hear, although they can,
a sound that seizes in your throat in dreams)
now vibrates fraught mimetic conversation:
drilling, knocking, garbled shouts without.

Interior, another room, where paintings
gaze out conjured forests, stare some seascapes
into being, streaked with gold and clouds
not round like real but squared in palimpsest
abstractions, miniature knowledges.
I paint them once again in thought, look out
beyond the grid where sudden gap in sky
dispenses rain and sun in contradiction.
But soon, exigencies proliferate;
as weather changes course, the clouds rush forth,
some rain is entering wherever there

are doors or windows left ajar, this storm
inviting storms from far away as if
colluding at the vanishing horizon
point of what is thinkable or real,
casting elsewhere of the map and mind
in intermittent flood and drought and fire—
in doubt, or trying out, but not yet
expert, theophantic genesis
(haphazard, lacking plan or reasoned rhyme).
For now, two streaks of birch rise luminous,
and taller than all trouble against the dark.