Weep with me, porous heart.
Weep with me, you, the permeable.
You spirit-scoured,
You crystal in the bedrock
bared by the rushing
Of moon suckling seas.

Call down indigo night and
Star-eaten grandmother blanket
To drape over us thatch huts
Trembling beneath the comet.

Cry with my hand in yours,
Widowed wolf alone in winter,
Hot breath clutched beneath roots
With no other heartbeat, just one
No other heartbeat, just one to
Ache howl pip ruby light
into the egg of time.

***

A hill witch poet told me
It was thought for a while
The beavers were going extinct.

They disappeared like the druids.
Stream-bending millions become fugitive rumors,
Gnaw sign, and maybe nuisance
To someone’s cultivars, somewhere.

Yet they had only died to the day. Shedding
millions of years of biorhythms
In a generation. They became

Nocturnal, furtive holy architects,
Concealed clan of slick pelt
Diamond tooth river kin
Stream seam bend mending
For the slowness, for the slowness,

Moon on water
From twilight to dawn.

Somehow beaver stepped
into the underworld
For at least a hundred years,
Until our steel traps all rusted
And then beaver stepped out again.

Sometimes a homeless mouse
Still takes up a dry wattle elbow
In the time-pocket hearth
Of a beaver den in winter.

Original hospitality,
Lichen on antler,
Lets the mouse
Dream in ease,
Wind and snow.

***

When a virus diminished
For a single geologic breath
The mandated patriotic incessence
Of highway, factory, and jet,
Seismologists registered
A never known in my lifetime
Muting of the imperial hum.
It was perceivable
for miles underground
And the dead felt its peace.

What happens to me
If I let myself admit
How much I want
This hum to stop?

What happens is:
The world turns to stone
And one day it melts again.

And the meltwater is
tears and smile
Quaking the body awake
And in the tearstream is a den.

In that den,
The rarest qualities
Will bed down
Beside you
With ease.

Your candle of old fat
Will be the comfort
Of ridealong newborn
Deities.

When the music changes
They begin to pip
and draw world into the egg
And they spill into the world.

***

If you wake one day
With the terrible memory
That you left Silence alone
On the trail somewhere
And the night has fallen
And the trail is for thieves
And you can’t remember where
And even then, you can’t, you can’t –

be. In your ache, become.
Be Silence.

Deny the quake
of blaring musts
Be still. Be refuge.

The stone in the stream
digs a hollow.

Deep enough down
there is a door in the hollow
To all those waiting guests.

After reason abandons his post
It yowls wide opens
And god and her mouse
Move in.

***

Silence,
I am ark for you
Stillness,
I am den for you
Tenderness,
Every single beat
Of my blood
Is sheepskin rug
For your curled body.