Here, as in childhood, Brother, no one sees us.
And someone has died, and someone is not yet born.

Our father walks through his church at night
and sets all the clocks for spring. His sleeplessness

weighs heavy on my forehead, his death almost
nothing. In the letter he never wrote to us

he says, No one can tell how long it takes a seed
to declare what death and lightening told it

while it slept. But stand at a window long enough,
late enough, and you may some night hear

a secret you’ll tomorrow, parallel to the morning,  
tell on a wide, white bed, to a woman

like a sown ledge of wheat. Or you may never
tell it, who lean across the night and miles of the sea,

to arrive at a seed, in whose lamplit house
resides a thorn, or a wee man carving

a name on a stone, the name of the one who has died,
the name of the one not born unknown.

Someone has died. Someone is not yet born.
And during this black interval,

I sweep all three floors of our father’s house,
and I don’t count the broom strokes; I row

up and down for nothing but love: his for me, my own
for the threshold, and for the woman’s voice

I hear while I sweep, as though she swept beside me,
a woman whose face, if she owns a face at all,

is its own changing. And if I know her name
I know to say it so softly she need not

stop her work to hear me. Though when she lies down
at night, in the room of our arrival,

she’ll know I called her.
And when she answers it’s morning,

which even now is overwhelming, the woman
combing her hair opposite to my departure.  

And only now and then do I lean at a jamb
to see if I can see what I thought I heard.

I heard her ask, My love why can’t you sleep? 
and answer, Someone has died, and someone

is not yet born. Meanwhile, I hear the voices
of women telling a story in the round,

and I sit down on the rough stoop, by the sea grass,
and go on folding the laundry I was folding,

the everyday clothes of our everyday life, the death
clothes wearing us clean to the bone.

And I know the tide is rising early,
and I can’t hope to trap the story

told in the round. But the woman I know
says, Sleep, so I lie down on the clothes,

the folded and unfolded, the life and the death.
Ages go by. When I wake, the story has changed

the firmament into domain, domain
into a house, and the sun speaks the day,

unnaming, showing the telling, dissipating
the boundaries of the story to include    

the one who has died and the one not yet born.
How still the morning grows about the voice

of one child reading to another.
How much a house is house at all due

to one room where and elder child reads
to his brother. And the younger knows by heart

the brother-voice. How dark the other rooms,
how slow morning comes

collected in a name
told at one sill

and listened for at the threshold of dew.
What book is this we read

together, Brother, and at which window
of our father’s house? In which upper room?

We read it twice: once in two voices, to each other,
and once in unison, to children

and the sun, our star, that vast office
we sit inside, while birds lend their church   

sown in air, realized in a body uttering
windows, growing rafters, couching seeds.