for Phoebe Stone & Bob Pack

Her coppery hair sprouting out of the grass,
a girl is lying beside the water, her knees
raised, the air from the river reaching
up her shorts. From her dream the green

gunmetal of Otter Creek, the scribble
of foam, the exact colors of leaf and leaf
shadow are shut out. Only the air may enter.

The hoarse bellow of the falls, the whimper
of eddies among the toppled pine trunks,
even the shifting of fallen dove feathers,
so close to inaudible, enter her dream.

It is the seminal mouthing of the formless
world that slips between her thighs, filling
the void of her body with a shaping music.

Less durable than poems, houses. Four walls
and a roof, the syntax of the two-by-four,
windows framing select landscapes: a square
sky, a trapezoidal meadow with oval hay bales

judiciously placed to suggest something simple
like loaves on a sill or old like a herd
of musk-ox. Something safe and sound.

But the drafts will enter, must enter, filling
the room with the unframed beginnings of speech:
insect whisper, grass sigh, last muttering
of the primal thunder. What enters is sound

only, dust in the ear. No thing is in place, but
all architectures, all colors are possible, inside
this house, inside this wind-rinsed sleeper.