East of Love

The one snowflake I gave to you hours ago has melted.
I am as restless as the bluebird the town is in search of
     reaching out over the churches.
The moon is no character, only something Christ sees double.
I plead my case in both the dark, old fashioned hemisphere
and the light, new age hemisphere.
Your sayings withstand my life.
My suitcase has become too narrow to travel in,
too light to live in.
You traveled everywhere, but you forgot to look in the tire swing.
Tom Joad is shadow in the wine.
Way back when, I called this poem The Preacher.
The wind machine blows a smile onto Al's face.
We are the clerks who spin Odetta out of obedient yarn.
Be a local, rung linked writer, a soluble ghost in the mirror
of names and amounts.
Erosion is a line in the dirt. Faith is a secondary shadow.
We are in the depth of field between surface and the promised side.
Advertisements of islands are stamped in the sunset.
(This is my wisdom.)
The only landscape is east of love.
The words I hang to dry on branches are dying like leaves.
I crumble their remains above the cauldron and stir them into soup.
(This is my wisdom.)
Restless essays twirl in oak leaves.
A house grapples on the threshold of renewal.
A luminary has an impact on the fettered confluence
where exaggeration meets truth branching.
(This is my wisdom.)
My best words fail to enlighten.
A flock of geese is in the rings of an oak   
The spokes of a bicycle wheel are twisted in the tree stump. 
A deer stands a step behind a fallen tree. 
The calm of the lake is in the jaws of a hawk. 
An orange dog walks a little white man. 
The thunder in the forest preserve
moves once more the strings on this marionette. 
It is a private matter as I turn away from you to continue my flight.
There is completeness in shouldering what the storm leaves.
All the knowledge of how to operate this square of land
is in the stamp of feet on the front steps.
A formation of geese flies across the sky followed by a lone goose. 
     My heart jumps to him.