The Weddynge Calendar
For Keha and Jeff
When in the fine hour of the morning, light
Finds the cracks to splay through darkness
And the rabbitting sun unfurls the hidden
Bark of 10,000 trees withholding all their colors
Through the night, and the green field
Turns more gold than green, the gold sands
Of the mountain shifting day by day
In the continual uplift of orogeny, mayflies
And maypoles, June’s mosquitos, July’s rain
Of solid light the dromedaries of the clouds
Dress in in their silent trek across the skies,
In August when the heat is cracked with night’s
First cold hints of those continents of ice
In Canada, may love furnish not its flower
But its root. The flowers come before. The flowers
Of the mornings when you are still awake
Incredibly in one another’s arms, or the memory
Of one another’s arms, the memory that swallows
Everything, the memory that is the sea to which
All returns, and from which all life springs forward
Forever in its flowering. Orange flowers of our
First love. White flowers of our second. Flowers
That crowd the veranda as they climb. September’s
Flowers that shimmer with impending loss.
Then October flowers with the grave. November’s
Flowers are white ashes of the rain. December wipes
The world white with its white flowers like a bone.
These are the hours of your chorus: two, two;
In the home that is the shell of you, the shell
Of you both crab walking into the future
That is the daughter of time. Then is the hour
When the black earth sings. When the bears
Of winter begin in earnest their ancient dreams
And we sleepless scavengers make our rounds
From TV to TV. In this vacuity, when air itself has
Become bored with the inability of ice to thaw,
When all of the world has become ice and only ice
Will grow, then your flowers pin their tiny futures
In the root of hope and except that tiny fire
Of hope leave you with nothing in the world
Of snow and snow. In that Saturn
Of emptiness may love furnish you the root
Of love, the force that cracks the earth and its ice,
In the dark beneath our drifting dramas on the ice.
May love’s fire awaken in you its 10,000 futures,
The shimmering worlds that cloak us in their hopes
And forgive perennially our errors. Our errors
Are perennial. They too are flowers. But we are in
This scattering of light an emblem of the sapphire
At the world’s core, drifting like flames, blue
Daggers of life and error, time’s chance, broken
Wagers, hopes split open and pulsing
With disavowal. Love is the light that shimmers
With 10,000 worlds, worlds we move inside,
Worlds like shells, shifting, merging, urging.
January comes with the chaos of being born, that
Tyrant of whitening dawns. That morning after.
Cold coffee, frosted pane. That’s the time of looking
Forwards to the edge of the hopeless dawn.
Spring is for looking backwards
To the muses in their gowns.
January, mother of darkness, widow of Hyperion,
Sharpening your tools in the shifting night,
Harbor too these twins of light, these doves.
Let light lift their hearts into the early flight
Of February’s love, and crack the shell of gloaming
Mounded above the snows. In the beginning
Was the garden and may the future be our gardens
With rivers running under them.
March together through these snows
To the steaming springs and the white mountains.
March together under the blue iris of the sun.
In that oldest month of being when the birth
Of new dark secrets opens the heart of the world
Again and releases its reliquaries’ birds,
Carry these secrets, the root of all living, the love
You have in this hour of your twining,
Into April’s sweetest rain.
Andrew Haley is a poet, writer, and translator who lives in Portland, Oregon. His first book of poems, Good Eurydice, was published by Otis Nebula in 2011. More info is available at andrewhaley.wordpress.com.
