Detour Around a Garden

Where the tunnel ends night opens
its toothless goldfish’s mouth.
This is the beginning of drumming: we’re liable
to keep from the truth of our being
those who kept us from the truth of theirs.
Forecastable birds dust a bonsai garden in the dark.
Every weathered garden corrects its map of spring.
The moonlit river breaks out in a postrider’s sweat
we watch as if we’ve never seen the glimmer
of stockinged legs. What the drumming promised
comes, first, in pulsations. We have come
too far from the beginning, muzzled, covered
in down, under which we each have been young.
Didn’t we harbor some heavenly sundown, clouds heaving
with some rash rain. Where night ends
the tunnel presses its mouth, cheek
to cheek, taking every time this too-far way.