—for Elizabeth Rose Shaffer

With leaves for the healing of nations
maples pave the streets
in gold, children shuffle
feet on brightened earth
—no need to look
toward empty sky.

It is not
there. They are jealous
of no birds, and the geese
precede them nowhere.

I
have never been easily
redeemed. As a child,
I was baffled by grave robbers
who stole gold and left
papyrus. As a woman,
I was little moved by blondes—
preferred it when you stripped your wig.

Once, you lay atop me
in the morning light, sun
at just the right angle
to your iris to illuminate
the gold. Sunflowers
bloomed and followed me,
yet I was drawn to the hearts
of brown seeds.

Camus
said that we spend our lives
searching for the two or three
images in whose presence
our hearts first opened,
and also that fall is a second
spring.

The kingdom is not
in the sky, but leaves remain
in the trees, beginning to fleck
with brown in the morning light
—as though God, in some
dark room, develops
the world from the negative
of your eye.

The eye with which
I see God, said Meister
Eckhart, is the eye with which
God sees me. I wouldn’t
have noticed gold in the branches
if it didn’t remind me of the brown
of your eyes. I am seen by the stripping
trees, beginning at last
to understand being made
from rib—how two women
make a world for one
another by turning each other
inside out.

By evening
light, the street is empty.
Only the wind, like a child,
plays in the leaves, over
sidewalk and under branches
that soon will be bare. Where
is beyond rust and moth?
Not any place that can be
reached by streets of gold
on this earth, nor any
place that can be imagined
with golden streets.

Brown
grows on golden leaves.
Our God is a god of wounds.

When the light leaves the sky,
my eyes, your eyes,
I will move toward the darkness
of uncreated light—
the brown that can make a world
from and for me again.