Cain in the Moon

So how do we feel about people who post their poems on blogs? Really grossed out, or only a little? I have to tell you, this winter has yielded a surfeit of poems. So I share one with you. It’s based on a medieval legend that Cain lives in the moon carrying sticks. I hope you like it.

Along the road towns happen,
Then, like a match struck, burn out
To fields ice-scratched but unbroken
By anything human. At times you catch
A scrap of coat, a shuffling flutter,
Where under packed branches someone bends.

These roads without rest for him
Seem designed to shame a pedestrian
Seen through bus windows in the prose
Of his labor. But a sibilant transience,
How blue smoke ribbons trees across the field.
You think of the boy and his mother
Beside a station who sang, put out palms.
Vague-aged, puckered like the too-soon-born,
We sing to bring the spring, both song
And action a lisped recitation, noteless.
Palms closed on coins and scorn.

Alone those figures mark you,
Barely. Like a little movement, forked
With twigs, inside a shadow on the moon.
Taken together they might gather,
Eternal, into some noble symbol
Of fugitives and wanderers. Noble,
Yet small, for seen from a great distance.

On an altogether separate orbit,
The bus stops in another town with a name
You won’t remember. Sodden, aproned,
A woman in the road battles water.
Ankle deep in it, she fills a bucket
With snow as it melts into pools, runs,
Fouls, freezes, again melts. Having been
Meted this arrival, you loiter un-met
But by her shovel, which receives
Then disposes what it doesn’t need.