Two Poems by Jeff Burt

Barn, Moth

The roll of the earth extinguishes
            the last flame of daylight,
                        a pitch, a yaw, then night.

A moth tumbles through
            the incandescent light
                        of the yard lamp

into that indeterminate
            strip of obscurity
                        where radiance diffuses

into absence and reflection,
           thin smooth glass
                        that shines like a jar

holding the glow of harvest
            and beyond the unlit cornfield
                        and darkness of my longing.

I miss your voice,
            at times a bellicose bar
                        beating against the metal of time

at times a filament drawn so thin
            one electric word wired to another
                        brings radiance to all around it.

 The Infinitive to Listen

Threatened by the sprawl of an oak
and unremitting sun
the timber and truss of the roof age,
crack, dry and rot,
the roofline no longer an erect V,
sides sagging as if the ink
that drew them had become wet
from the winter’s rain.

I spy bumps and swales in the linear run—
squirrels have planted acorns
in the shingles, pushing up a corner
of a square and tamping down,
but the shingles appear more like
Fedoras with the brim curled from overuse
of a gripping tip of acknowledgment.

I have lived here too long, perhaps,
to go on explaining to prospective buyers
about picking holly sprigs
bent over the eaves in the winter
and how one has to dress the outside lights
from the power feed and grounding hub
on the roof or risk a sudden electrical flip,
flop and pitch to the yard below,
the dent in the gutter from a branch
of the cedar across the street that sailed
like a straw in the gusts of a winter storm,
the little pocket in the beam
where a chickadee had her nest
and a crow or jay could not pierce,
the flat area where in spring
one year recovering from a torn calf
I bathed in sunlight and read Chinese poetry
until I saw every bush, shrub
and stripling as an ideogram,
learned how complicated
the pen-stroke graphic 
of the infinitive to listen is,
with speaker, hearer, past
and present, whispers
and blares of vocables
held in a single image,
with not a single vowel,
phoneme or syllable
to explain the entirety of to listen.

We have no heirs to this house,
only to our home, which travels
in the lives of our children.
I have learned this roof is a brushstroke
that cannot be spoken.

Jeff Burt works in mental health. He has contributed to Rabid Oak, Ecotheo Review, Williwaw Journal, and won the 2017 Cold Mountain Review Poetry Prize.