Texas Porchlight

Sometimes she wears her beauty like a scar
whose story is obscure and violent.
As though within the light of her cheekbones
the gold east Texas porchlight on the man’s
breaking skull still radiates. As though
the yellow of the rooms within the house
where she stood watching the bat come down
inside the circled men or the sound
of that opening in the hot, locust night
is in her mouth, behind her thin carved lips.
But this is not about pity nor are her eyes,
which glisten here like the stones sang
in the stream behind her house
in Oregon in winter. Where the rain
made the whole land hymn as it decayed.
And this is not about echoing, nor
how water carries all the ridge
downhill with it. It is about the power
of powerlessness, the way things form
from what flows through them. Not
the ridge coming down, but the banks
standing up. The secant life, tangent
dreams, the geometry of witness,
the geography of loss building within,
pushing its terrific, silencing beauty out.