The poet is eavesdropping on the sycamores at dusk. They talk with the copper light, the wind they trap with long, knotted fingers — their shapes racing against the chipped walls of the village where he has banished himself at forty to live with his mother, now that his child bride has been two years in the grave. In the light and chatter of the trees, the poet is resolved to die teaching children French, to live out what’s left, years shipwrecked in a sea of smoldering olive groves, the small pleasures of regular verbs and nightfall in rural Spain. He has only to read the gossip of the trees, their talk of the lost bride. Leanor, they say, how fragile she was when they married, and how consumption riddled her away from him. The sycamores know there was so little left of her that he secretly wanted to carry her coffin like a guitar case against his chest, with neither company nor ceremony, all the way to the grave. As the day fades, the trees mutter in their ranks before the last light leaves them. The conversation is over. The poet, ashamed, exposed on his hill, shivers among the silent arches, the dark plaza, where lions bite down on the brass rings of the doors. Reprinted with permission from Willow Springs Copyright © 2006 by Miles Waggener

EQUULEUS by Miles Waggener

Moonrise, Wukoki, 1999 Without garden they woke to impulse, were poorly suited to surfaces that shunned their strides. If it was cold, they exhaled storms if it hailed on them, they stormed back cutting themselves, cutting in half the night they let pass beneath their gait, only to join it again transformed, no less inhospitable as any underworld of our making, thunder cells of first steps retold in the painted skies of their skin. Saddled without rider, moonrise blinding Cassiopeia's Chair before another turn, we say now that the horse followed us to the ruins, that crater-scarred worlds shifting in haunches as she walked were ours, that four winged fruits, wing- like bracts of saltbush, were radiant as if she knew what we in our telling never arrive at. We lay where roofless walls opened to the sky, where the dead were buried in floors, perhaps the bones of a child holding us in place, row upon row of stones ending in stars. She had come so far, this mare who lowered her head into fields of one seeded fruits that do not split. Winds went on sharpening rock back to earth. As if waking for the first time into our lives, we were luminous, honed with her, and into this world, we woke as strangers. Reprinted with permission Copyright © 2006 by Miles Waggener

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