After Tomas Tranströmer’s “Midwinter”
The moon’s horn sounds
its silver chord, sending
them into my summer woods
thick with possibility.
Then: the rain-slick river.
The ashen world above
muffled, water fills their ears
with its wily whisper: Let go
in the crack of the current.
Their ancestors’ voices swell.
Gurgle of fish, human exhalation.
It’s in the surfacing, I think,
where they also smuggle the dead
across the border.