Scene with Cranes

Had my father lived, I would have learned
how to soften beeswax in my palms
and seal my ears, unswayed by
domestic accords, dullness drills—
the scent of laundered clothes
drying in light air, floorboards scrubbed
clean, the dooryard swept clear.

The July I was born, the dead already
had begun gathering-in, putting-by
the bounty summer unloads
into peck- and bushel-sized baskets,
cramming cellars full to the rafters
with blue-skinned squash, potatoes crated,
tiered shelves of jars stacked two high, three deep.

The time that enfolds a body's
forgetting isn't so much the time
of ripening grains, nor is it the time
a forest takes to root its own mind in place—
its raptures passed along tendrils
sometimes years before reaching
climax. This autumn as last, vexed by unknowing,

miscalculation, flocks spiraling up as they form,
calling in all directions along that curve
join us. Grief hangs in cottonwoods like a skin,
woodsmoke in the air these mornings
I go out to watch pairs depart—
the number always fewer than last
I counted, and always breaking off

my reckonings half-finished,
leaving the remainder odd.