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Haiku Free Verse Prosies
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For, but not about, Carrie
Through frozen pastures I went wandering,
a meandering stream to guide me.
It was a test. It was a journey. You were
not there with me. You were not at the end
of the journey. You were not
even in the the lexicon of its meaning--
a kind of steaming halo, a kind of house,
an ironship, a locomotive with its
own logic, self-contained.
 In the pasture I followed,
along the stream, the language of iron ceased to make sense.
We entered a language of flowers
and nightsoil. The land itself began to steam
and the birds no longer sang. Under the earth,
on the other side of morning,
I knew the sun was making its strange round
and found comfort in that.
Follow the stream to its source. It is broken,
but unceasing. Where it breaks,
seek the source of its breaking. Seek the moment
it delves underground. Follow the movement
of the water under the earth. Where language ceases,
follow breath. Where breath ceases, follow the lines
that hover in the air, silver, unspoken.
At the end of the line, the stream reappears,
meandering always, and broken I realize now
is the language of steam engines and classrooms.
The pasture becomes a wood.
The wood becomes a tundra.
On the tundra, even the pale clouded sky
darkens to black. And in the blackness,
I see the clarity of the stars.
I see that the blackness is not black,
but blue. A deep midnight blue, not a death
but a stillness. And still walking, still following
the slowing flow of the stream, I knew the silence
and the movement of ice.
Ice is not still. Ice flows onward,
the grand movement of glaciers
and the gifts they leave behind.
The kettle ponds and boulder piles,
the stillness of the New England woods
still remembering that time
when the slowness of the glaciers
was upon them.
They leave me there
on a hill too rocky for planting,
too rocky for building. It is springtime,
still cold, and the woods are bare
with the promise of buds in their rising sap.
Old leaves carpet the stillness.
A stream runs downhill.
A woman bellows her remorse.
Iron has been replaced by aluminum,
and we are mining the black blood
of the earth. If you listen, you can hear
us rushing to our doom, just beneath
the sound of the springtime stream.
August 2005
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