Birds walk low to the ground among the stalks of the wheat.
They are not afraid. It is late summer. No one is afraid.
In their dreams the men and women stand in the night
on the peaks of their houses with their children between them
and stare up into the cold clear current where the earth
eats the moon. A pale wind combs their hair.
At the edge where it touches the hills with its hands
and breath and yellow feet the sky is never dark.
Now I realize how far we are from eternity.
We step slowly through it.
A loon rises before the beginning of the world.
The wind blows furiously yet the trees do not catch it at all.
It is good that the grass splashes with rain: the key of a piano
pressed lightly down into shadow and springing back.
I have dressed in my old coat of grass. I am fire.
I am fire. I have dressed in my old coat of grass.
Harold Rhenisch is an active literary editor of poetry, non-fiction, fiction and cross-genre work. His work includes memoir, drama, fiction, translation and environmental writing. These poems will appear in September from Frontenac House in his twelfth edition of poems, Two Minds, a book of ghazals that he wrote over 30 years, while his other 27 books came and went. Along the way he has won the Malahat Review Long Poem Prize (twice) and the Ryga Prize.
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