for Talia Rose Shoch

The midday moon scrapes into the sky
with its long lurk beyond the invisible

currents of insect, the clouds so fragrant
to the eye, the thin footprints of aircraft

darkening patches of blue like a night
poorly remembered. Between two

unburnt barns, the buck’s antlers imitate
each other. Their gentle velvet cracks

the eye’s relationship to what flows
around it, suggesting ghosts, suggesting

a cosmos lost in the shade
of a slippery elm. Best to scoop hearts

with a handsaw, to propagate gravel
from lung to lung like a song

before today lurches into tonight.
Now the mirror tangles up

its light and the scissors bend
at the beak, but they still score,

like a slip of lava descending the stairs,
the jagged line from the seer to the seen.