Notes for a Life. In a Swing. No Wind to Speak of.
Sam Rasnake

—Sally Mann, Untitled (Deep South #23), 1998


The field is the mouth of the dead.

Starlings drift the summer’s late amber

as though a photograph’s gelatin silver



has come to life, and you breathe in,

you breathe out—that other world.

Your lungs are sadness, full-measured.



A faultless tension. The scarred tree’s

gift is silence. At the edge of hearing,

the slow river’s story—all moss and



bush—slips its bridge between darkness

and darkness—while the sky, always

the patient doppelgänger, sits on water.



Whole forests & towns & time swallowed

in ivy. One trickle of sweat beside the ear.

Somewhere a banjo, somewhere a hound.