How Men Pray

Your Mars was looming before dawn this morning
at your west horizon of your overbig sky; from here on
it will fade. The planet was amber. Your silence prevailed.

All things seemed to observe the moment. Even the dog
paused to look, in dewy grass, elbow deep, at the edge
of the lake's flat black water. Your day was just beginning.

Yesterday at our same time Mars was higher
in a slightly brighter sky. The days are getting shorter.
When I first began watching, last month, longest days,

heat of summer, the moon passed over ahead of Mars;
but during the month Mars left it far behind, the moon
in its nightly phases, in a big cool orbit of its own,

and Venus and Saturn splayed and went their different ways
and while the big dipper kept its shape, it pivoted and twirled
like a kite hooked to Polaris which remained at your North

as if pinned there. What a living thing your night sky is.
In its hours between the light, we might think it passes
in formation. No. Your synchrony is far bigger than that.

At night on the Penland ridge in the second week,
I'm lonely again; from the loft
the cabin stretches away in all directions;
the stirring sounds isolate me -
of the mice skittering past my traps
in the cabinet beneath the sink,
of the nightbirds and wheezing crickets
in the llama field nearby, of the soaring mountain
wind lifting through the pine stand;
but then, 3:28, the train
loaded down with gravel labors through, pulling
for a while, then on the downhill holding
back, the air brakes' unworldly song bouncing
off the flat-flowing river Toe and rising up a dark
hillside of shadow pine and moon poplar.
I lie near the window, the candle out,
my face as close to the screen as I can get it.
I pray for sleep before the silence comes again.
The last car, still far away, is rumbling up the hill and
rounding the curve from Spruce Pine to Penland Post,
but the engine's whistle, far in the future, is calling
already to Newdale bridge and Burnsville crossing.
I breathe in the interrupted air.
I'm calling forward, too. "I'm up here!" I shout
into the dark of my new dream, and I am.

I have a persistent image of the past
as a grave we stare up out of
so we can easily see the sky
and the clouds passing in their varied moods -
but old friends, in their separate holes,
cannot see us;
so there's no real sadness
that you didn't remember my face
because for me the past is a death already
but I'm glad you remembered my name.