She'd thrown a pair of pants across the floor

She'd thrown a pair of pants across the floor
that still were wet. The Mississippi mud
was in their woven fabric, through the window
she looked at the damp world. Within the walls
of houses that I am celebrating, sit
and listen with me a while. I understand

the silence of a music, I'm understanding
delicate bird-song. I hear the creaking floor
when she moves on it, watch her legs that sit
on chairs and under clothes. It was a muddy
run in the morning, when the house's walls
were sweating in the new day and the windows

fogged-up slightly. She sat by the window
and listened to the air, how the trees stand
in the soft ground, how fixed the sound of walls.
I had thrown my many books across the floor
and scattered many poems, under the mud
I left some photographs and letters sitting

there for someone else to find. Poems sit
inside my belly for a while, the windows
of my eyes inform them with images of mud
and bayous. I wonder how the iris stands
in the thick August heat, how the muddy floor
of marshes houses bugs. There are no walls

in swamps, how free are ideas without walls
or doors to hold them? That way they can sit
within the air like clouds and hit the floors
of many lands like rains. I sit by the window
and think about her clothes, the way she stands
in the dim light, the way she moves the mud

between her toes. I want to move the mud
around her curving body, paint the walls
with her round forms. I start to understand
the nothing that I am—see how trees sit
and ask not if they're heard? Open the window
to my heart, move your feet on the wood floors

of my spent body. The floor is tracked with mud
and walls have finger smudges, I close the window
and sit until I know how the trees stand.