We build a pagoda
of firewood,
letting the wind dry the logs:

a holy place with a hungry draft

I have imagined a place
– a chair, a table, a book, a pen –
by the little window
in the aging playhouse beyond the wood-pagoda,
where children now grown once played;
a kind of woodland hut beyond the farmyard;
a Li Po place
for solitude & meditation,
a nook
of the kind Gaston Bachelard describes
in The Poetics of Space,
where the moment itself is the mirror;
the clear lake of consciousness,
where the moon dwells

Tonight the rain falls heavily
over Sápmi's late June;
the silence is full of it;
giving Cesi & Silver
thoroughly wet fur
and drooping whiskers
as they hunt through the grass

Only time itself
possesses their feline patience

When I switch off the lamp,
there is only me here –
and the rain speaking to me
through the mosquito screen
with ten thousand Tao tongues –
while the rivers of the sky
rush through the downspouts;

the house
a vibrating spacecraft
on the launch pad,
every engine erupting,
full throttle