As regards my recent silence there was just too much to say.
Yes I mean the forest of late summer becoming the forest of fall
becoming the charismatic forest of mute and callous intent.

O yes I mean the snow forest becoming the first forest
just beyond the glass door we put there deliberately
to stare at the trees that have nothing at all to say, if you're willing

to listen: just the branch going down and some kind of lion
rising—just the fox and raccoon looking hard with me looking back
with just my boys in my head since they're gazelles by disposition

who won't be protected from any aspect of the forest
but must stand smack-dab in the middle of the wreck
that isn't the wreck of the weather, but the wilder, harder wreck

of the missing father and abstracted mother that's the hard-line wreck
of the hard-listening inside that by disposition and genetics
will lean them against the pine and alder and snow birch

for six seven eight nine months of whatever we are when we lock our mouths
to mourn our losses from the insides of our jackets and black wool caps
with just our eyes in our faces and the lungs in our chests

in the flabbergasted shut up of sucking and sucking and sucking it in.