Weekly Poem: ‘The Eaves’

By Caroline Knox

The eaves drip in dreams and for real too in constant delicate falls of dew condensing and recondensing.
The trees drip always at night, dreams or not, hung down with diamonds, and both water sounds and animal sounds
recur in the dark, as borrowed and leftover light glances off the textured, mushy, or glazed surfaces of nature, manufacture.
The trees overdrip the eaves and onto smaller trees and over large obscure weeds reaching up, ombré shadows.
These sounds echo in the root cellar. The least air lifts other weeds
out of sand and silt—jagged serrate species, ikat blades. The weeds are ransacked by unexpected new rain contributing to the passive dew and riding on a heavy wind now
pulling loose and detaching a gutter which, falling, scrapes along the quoins, clattering
into the catch-basin; in the drywells, gutter and sash fragments, with runnels of swill gathering leaves and filth, trellis lath and vines. And the rusted gate, hinge and hasp buckling backward, shaken off its old posts, is swept away too, from a dwelling-place destroyed not by fire but deliberately by water,
the abraded house half asphalt shingles and half cedar shakes, luminous cedar shakes on the roof
down the deep eaves, asphalt shingles on the ell, in the open yard.

Caroline Knox is the author of eight volumes of poetry, including “Flemish” (Wave Books, 2013) and “Quaker Guns” (Wave Books, 2008), which received a Recommended Reading Award 2009 from the Massachusetts Center for the Book.