How the Sky Touches
by Paul Gibbons

Beyond the point where the fenceline disappears
in fall, willows turn and sound like they’re turning,

a burro in a field flattens its ears
against its head and then offers them up again the way
a young daughter, waiting around her father who digs a ditch,
suddenly extends her arms to be picked up,

and that is how the sky comes closer, bringing with it
a cloud that started waning miles ago
but now has thinned out to a line that hovers
in the eye of the burro, and the white line stretches too

above the field until its tail is pointing at a barn in front of which
browning grass waves suddenly
and then the willows startle and whistle like a river moving
from its bank, and the barn shifts as the first

corner rattles and around the red slats
dust throws itself like an element should
when the unseen seems to have descended,

and like wasps clouding their nests in the eave
there is the small awful display of one thing
following another, and though the otherwise cloudless sky
surely has been broken by the surly thread of white,

you know it is no less sky, no less the dust spiking past
itself and nothing else. And you are tempted to believe in it.
You look post by post into the field and you hear

your mother shout to you, a splinter working its way
through the burro and barn and the sky. And this, maybe this,
is a way to say, if you are asked, how you are touched
seven years after her death.