To Knowing a Man (from Jacksonville) Pt. 1

You sang in your sleep last night, dear,

about Jacksonville and the snows

that were to come from over  

the Adirondacks, peeking

out from under crows’ wings,

before the Indian summer folded up.

Last night when you were singing,

I made a cabin room for you in the walls

of my own shadowy brain, in the smoke

of a chanting moon. The beams held,

even under weight of my autumn hair

dewy with the swoon of dusk.

The windows fogged up with my thoughts

of you and of winter stretching

across the skin of the fruited earth,

drying out the trees and blowing

stories with a powdery mouth.

The record player caught up

old winter’s tales and weaved them,

while I watched the pictures playing

on the RCA, blackly, whitely,

a mist of us that descended

on the beaches of Alki,

on the branches of Ontario’s sallow

woods; that crept like Civil War ghosts

whistling Dixie in the corridors

of our old haunts; plantation

dreams of an old feeling.

Your chair was creaking, dear,

without person, in a certain dust;

The rounded glass of scotch tipping

off, sweating all its liquid out.

It went on dripping, making the bear

rug drunk so that it snored loudly

all through the night, dreaming,

exhaling whole forests

and the rifled arms of hunters, red

in mangled plaid, until

the paperboy came

wrinkled up and dressed in morning.

I cooked brown eggs

as the front page read:

Snowstorm Descends on Jacksonville—and I

was thinking, I wish I’d known.