for Wallace Stevens

She could cliff and order waves, if they were climb-
ing up to reach her touch, or curling in
with drowning, freezing, fingers. . . She hears

the phantoms tooling over shale, their long
unrooting waverings singing the air
into her hands. Then, as she plants and pours,
learning her music, with no difference how

she seeds them out, or harvests in, or racks
the dark with her questioning, she pulls the caves
from sleep with her answering chant and noticing shore.
The waves won’t hear her now; she won’t feed them;

and it won’t matter how she pulls them in,
gathers their green in seedlings weighted all
spiralling through, to make her bounded dream.

First collected in Calendars (Tupelo Press, 2003, second edition with CD, 2008).