Third Well 2 (2003)

There is a third well
here, inside that inward
room which tolls
inside a tomb: It takes
three matins to descend
here, three songs of
plunging bone, to name
sweet heaven’s lowest
clime, where backwards
angels rise..Someone
throw me a trope,
a wile, a fin to swim
my way home. It’s
5:30 a.m., cat in one
window, black cat
at the rear door, sweet
wife asleep upstairs:
The air blowing in
through the window
rich and sexual full
of rain darkly here
from this sea and that:
Cat in the third well
purring, demurring
to this work which
is a gelid rich pleasure,
born of out and down
motions. This poem’s
a bucket of what I
found there, cold and
sweet, infinitely true
and impossible to name
or reach or harrow
though it tries, furrowing
and barrowing into
this land before dawn,
filling the third sigh
before the stir which
wakens all the day.