HAY*

Loping in a grief-soaked cloak
through what feels like

a century of tundra vigils,
dark forest initiatory fires,

and a thousand acres
of banished thought,

a lone pilgirm kisses
the dead along the way -

the ones that don't know 
their dead yet.

He passes grave diggers
doing their moonlit digging

while barn owls hunt
to the sound of 

their unsyncopated shovels.

This man's pilgrimage

is not to reach some
bejeweled mountain palace

but to simply to find
a field of fresh-cut hay

in the mind and sleep 

of a towheaded boy's

fevered, summer

dreaming.

*Inspired by an essay by Martin Shaw entitled, The Hawk and the Otherworld