The Blue Breath in the Red Branch I Am Painting What You Cannot See

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GREGORY DONOVAN

The blue breath in the red branch I am painting what you cannot see. –David Freed

Whatever wind blows across that wintry branch turns it red, setting loose a blue exhalation that trails off like the last breath that broke down and gave way inside the last word the old man could hardly whisper when he saw everything was fire and vanishing, and as he stood there, which is to say here, looking out across the river in shock until the horses below hung their heads and shook their harness, he could feel it burning into him like a glowing iron brand, a knot he could never undo, but when it released him he plunged down the bank, jumped up into the wagon and took off into history

with a curse. Later that sour breath became a sparrow’s chirp tangled up in whatever I said the last frigid day we stood here, looking into the same frothing waters he crossed back then, on the run from his own pyramid of guilt and rage piled up heavy as stone, running from where I stand again now among these Victorian and still older stones on the cemetery bluff, keeping watch as a heron arrows into the chill gray and black ducks skim down and geese round the curve in this river I insist on calling my river and keep calling it so, peace to Heraclitus and to you and to all of the dead who keep on wanting to come back. This river, my river, burns with the weak coin of pale winter sun and carries its lights without pause to the sea.

So I breathe my smoke into the ruined air that’s made clean again down inside the old trees and that wind is here, bending the branch weighted with the breath of the man who died to lie buried here 131

beneath my feet, a man who in the end had nothing much himself to say, no last sentence to carve into stone so that when the wind came back like the cheated dead to blow out that breath trapped in the branch and tear it open against his rock, the words not chiseled there could neither hide nor disappear, even as the stone itself turned black.

Did that man have it right, say nothing, or is it that his words, and mine, and yours are—all together now, blow out the candles—all a shattering smoke in the wind that now chafes the branch and chafes the branch again and rattles its last few leaves as if they were dice to be shaken or just some numbers as you said then, looking down at the slab like a shimmering door, your own breath a blue knife of smoke, sharp as the scrape of a hand swiped at a frosted window so that we might see.

Crazyhorse