Ephemera

Each morning I sit in silence, time slides, changes
in my heart, a moss covered cavern where its fire
wakes me to a camaraderie of light, my wife waking

upstairs to walk to her window to pray, to gaze
outward at the pasture where Wappinger people eyed
white men making laws to own people and the land.

Art rules this old house, its rough rafters set in earth
as the colony became a state, and Poughkeepsie forgot
its own wonder, a gathering of reeds on banks of a river

Hudson believed would take him to China, his breath
unnoticed these days by the hummingbirds that visit
our door, sounds of their wings like my fingers tapping

my mother’s empty Tupperware bowl, with cake batter
a thin film she let me lick only when I was good, the taste
something I let leave as I sit, waiting to be aware, woke

as some say. I imagine the sun, its fire, its electricity,
waiting for us when we have lived all we can live, hoped
all we can hope, some of us snatched away by the virus,

corona wrath of a world disturbed. Surprised as we
are by nature’s decisions, we refuse to surrender,
to let go of what kills us when we try to control all

of what we cannot see. Our house is now inside me.
It is me, I am it, my bowels and spine its forgotten
birth, my thinning skeleton now its heavy rafters,

my emptiness its emptiness, my fullness its fullness,
or ideas of the breath, our two minds held still by
the fastening of it all, hook and joint, sinew and bone.