28. Eigner’s Fiction

water in a run running with light

sunlight through slats
as if blindness, the sun
suddenly could make of it

what we might have found
on the finished tread of a stair

a single unswept hair

voices of birds in trees
without birds, without sight of
birds in trees

we go by instinct
by pattern, the language of pattern
after a time subsumes us
we become the expectation we believe

things from your life
a room of one’s own
a place to wait
open stairs

voices of air
or the long run is never finished

the listening for it
forward
like a leaning

instantaneous
but without it

a side window clear as if open
and the sound comes through it

light as liquid permeates
the room, shapes of light
against the walls, broken
by furniture, patterns of
shadow in the light

deep crease of shadow
in place of dark

movement
in the form of wind
and formless

a slanted wind

filling the cup of a hand
hung low

the way you move your bones
in the wind and the light
in a light wind and

the light wound tight
about your head

tremors at your feet
even if my left hand goes numb

as if the blood stopped

fingers as creakings
but silent

the birds, too

Larry Eigner, it seems,
did not write a poem the day I was born
he wrote one the day before

as I was born, he looked
out a window in Swampscott

the sky in plain view