from SEA SALT: POEMS OF A DECADE 2014
KÉFI
Every meal a communion.
The uninvited dead are here.
Do they miss the taste of wine
or the flickering glare
of the candle in the window?
I remember some of their names.
Their appetites are hollow.
They crowd like moths to the flame
but the poor things cannot burn.
Light-headed in this company,
I look at them all in turn.
The Greeks would call this kéfi,
ineffable, weightless, tuned
to the conversations of the night
with or without a moon.
O everything’s all right.
It’s kéfi—coffee would wreck it,
or too much wine, but a song
if I can remember it
will carry us along.
NEW WORLD
Snow in the pines, spring snow, and a white cloud
glowering, smoke blown from that old pacer
who pauses for all day, and then moves on.
The felled trees lie in the steaming forest
lit by the far coals of the world’s beginning.
The fox darts over jeweled kinnikinnik—
Be quick, be quick, say the black beads of his eyes,
and with any luck our eyes will follow him
as far as a look can take us, darting through sleep
A THORN IN THE PAW
Once I was a young dog with a big thorn
in its paw, slowly becoming that very thorn,
not the howl but the thing
howled at, importunate, printing in blood.
Others grew up with chrism, incense, law,
but I was exiled from the start to stare
at lightning hurled from the sky
into a lake that revealed only itself.
Others had pews and prayer-shawls, old fathers
telling them when to kneel and what to say.
I had only my eyes
my tongue my nose my skin and feeble ears.
Dove of descent, fat worm of contention,
bogeyman, Author—I can’t get rid of you
merely by hating the world
when people behave at their too-human worst.
Birds high up in their summer baldachin
obey the messages of wind and leaves.
Their airy hosannas
can build a whole day out of worming and song.
I’ve worked at the thorn, I’ve stood by the shore
of the marvelous, drop-jawed and jabbering.
Nobody gave me a god
so I perfect my idolatry of doubt.
THE TELLER
He told me, maybe thirty years ago,
he’d met a rawboned Eskimo named Jack
while filming polar bears on an ice floe.
Jack went out fishing in his sealskin kayak
but the current carried him so far off course
that when a Russian freighter rescued him
they signed him as a mate to Singapore.
Five years at sea it took to get back home.
The year an Englishman gave him his name.
The year of hustling on a Bali beach.
The year of opium in Vietnam.
The year he pined for snow. The year he searched
for any vessel that would turn toward Nome.
The man who told me? I tell you, I don’t know.
THE FAWN
The vigil and the vigilance of love . . .
Sitter to three towheaded, rowdy boys,
the spoiled offspring of the local doctor,
our cousin Maren came north for a summer
and brought us stories of the arid south—
cowpokes and stone survivals.
One afternoon
she summoned two of us to the garage,
a leaning shed with workbench, vise, and tools
stood up between dark studs and logging chains.
A cobwebbed window faced the windy lake
and let in light that squared off on the floor,
and there, quick-breathing on the cracked concrete,
a wounded fawn’s black eyes looked back at us.
Maren told how a neighbor’s dog had caught it,
showed us the wheezing holes made by the teeth,
the spotted fur blood-flecked, the shitty haunch
where it had soiled itself in the lunged attack.
Don’t know where its mama got to, Maren said.
Poor thing’s scared. Don’t touch it. Run get a bowl
for water.
When I came back she made a bed
of tarps and grass. Our tomboy cousin had hauled
that wounded fawn down from the neighbor’s field.
Now she nursed it until dusk. Our father
stopped by with his satchel after rounds
and Maren held the fawn so he could listen.
Shaking his head, he sat back on his heels,
removed the stethoscope. He called the vet
who told him there was nothing they could do
but wait it out.
I don’t know, our father said.
Sometimes you shouldn’t interfere with nature.
A mean dog isn’t nature, Maren said.
Well I’m not blaming you for being kind.
Our father brought a blanket from the house,
a baby bottle filled with milk, and he
and Maren shared the vigil for the fawn,
leaving a light on as they might for a child
sick in some farmer’s house.
Three days—a week—
and father backed the car to the garage
to carry out the dead fawn in a tarp
and bury it in some deep part of the woods,
unmarked, and later unremarked upon
with summer over and our cousin gone.
If I tell you it was 1963
you’ll know a world of change befell us next,
but maybe it was ’62. I know
it was before the war divided us
and more than that, before our parents grew
apart like two completely different species,
desert and woods, cactus and thorny vine,
before our nation had its family quarrel,
never quite emerging from it. We boys
had sprouted into trouble of all kinds,
three would-be rebels from a broken home,
and when I next saw Maren, a rancher’s wife
in Colorado, she was all for Jesus,
getting saved and saving every day
in some denomination she invented.
We gave up calling and we never write.
The vigil and the vigilance. Our troubles
happened, but were smaller than a country’s.
My older brother died at twenty-eight—
an accident in mountains. Our mother sobered
up two decades later. Father died
so far removed from his former sanity
I struggle to remember who he was.
The years are a great winnowing of lives,
but we had knelt together by the fawn
and felt the silence intervene like weather.
I’m still there, looking at that dying fawn,
at how a girl’s devotion almost saved it,
wet panic in its eyes, its shivering breath,
its wild heart beating on the concrete floor.
FATHERS AND SONS
Some things, they say,
one should not write about. I tried
to help my father comprehend
the toilet, how one needs
to undo one’s belt, to slide
one’s trousers down and sit,
but he stubbornly stood
and would not bend his knees.
I tried again
to bend him toward the seat,
and then I laughed
at the absurdity. Fathers and sons.
How he had wiped my bottom
half a century ago, and how
I would repay the favor
if he would only sit.
Don’t you—
he gripped me, trembling, searching for my eyes.
Don’t you—but the word
was lost to him. Somewhere
a man of dignity would not be laughed at.
He could not see
it was the crazy dance
that made me laugh,
trying to make him sit
when he wanted to stand.
HOME CARE
My father says his feet will soon be trees
and he is right, though not in any way
I want to know. A regal woman sees
me in the hallway and has much to say,
as if we were lovers once and I’ve come back
to offer her a rose. But I am here
to find the old man’s shoes, his little sack
of laundered shirts, stretch pants and underwear.
Rattling a metal walker for emphasis,
his pal called Joe has one coherent line—
How the hell they get this power over us?—
then logic shatters and a silent whine
crosses his face. My father’s spotted hands
flutter like dying moths. I take them up
and lead him in a paranoiac dance
toward the parking lot and our escape.
He is my boy, regressed at eighty-two
to mooncalf prominence, drugged and adrift.
And I can only play, remembering who
he was not long ago, a son bereft.
Strapped in the car, he sleeps away the hour
we’re caught in currents of the interstate.
He will be ashes in a summer shower
and sink to roots beneath the winter’s weight.
MRS. VITT
The first to realize what a liar I was,
a boy pretending to have read a book
in second grade about a big black cat
(I’d made it as far as the cover silhouette),
the first to let us choose our spelling words
like telephone and information, long
pronounceable portions of the sky outside,
words I ever after spelled correctly,
the first to tell me I was a funny boy
or had a funny sense of the truth, or had
no sense of it but was funny anyway,
Mrs. Vitt began to shake one day,
lighting her cigarette in the teachers’ lounge,
or carrying coffee in her quaking hands.
I was in high school then, but heard she’d quit
and went to visit her in the old north end
of town, and met her thin, attentive husband
strapping her to a board to hold her straight.
She smiled at me, though her head shook to and fro.
It took her husband many lighter flicks
to catch her swaying cigarette. She looked
like a knife-thrower’s trembling model. Mrs. Vitt,
I blurted out. I’m sorry. She stared at me,
but whether she was nodding or shaking no
I couldn’t tell. Sorry I lied so much.
I must have given you a lot of grief.
And she, with each word shuddered out in smoke:
No child I taught was any grief to me.
DRIVING WITH MARLI
Grandpa, do you live in the sky?
No, but I live on a mountain
and came on a plane to see you.
Why?
All leaping thought and ruminant pool,
a three-year-old is a verbal fountain,
water clear enough to see through.
Anything can fool
the wizard in the front seat of the car.
How far will we go, Grandpa? How far?
Little one, I must relearn
all subjects such as distances,
study the foolishness and burn
like candlelight to worry less and less
about the night.
It’s not that youth is always right
but that an aging man
is too preoccupied with plans.
I do live in the sky,
but I do not know why.
THE NAPE
In the cidery light of morning
I saw her at the table
reading the paper, her cup
of coffee near at hand,
and that was when I bent
and brushed the hair from her nape
and kissed the skin there, breathing
the still-surprising smoothness
of her skin against my lips—
stolen, she might say,
as if I would be filled
with joy of touching her,
I the fool for love,
and all that history carried
back to me in the glide
of mouth on skin, knowledge
of who she is by day
and night, sleeping lightly,
rocked in gentle privacy,
or outside in the garden
probing earth and planting.
We had been this way for more
than twenty years, she
leading a life of purpose
rarely stated, and I
just back from somewhere else.
I brushed my lips on her skin
and felt her presence through me,
her elegant containment
there in the cidery light.
THE FUTURE
The future, best greeted
without luggage in hand,
outside the terminal
where trees behave as they will,
dressing, undressing,
or dressed to kill,
where we are the species
birthing ideas
from our eyes from our hands
our ears our skin,
from soil in our pores
and love we pour out
in letters and emails—
the future is always
more open than we think,
though not for some,
the warnings remind us,
not for some.
Like you I am trying
to leave my luggage
behind in the car
or the circling carousel, walk
openhanded
from terminal doors.
Because like you
I have walked and flown
through calendar hours,
dreamed through minutes and years
and the breadcrumb days
I leave by the road . . .
We know we are nothing,
forgetting our names
or the names of the cities,
the nothing we know as we know
the light on a window,
river of rivers.
OUT
When thunder tore the dark
I woke and smelled the rain
alone in another house
and all that held me gone.
I’d hurt you in the night
and left the day to bleed
and cast my self away
to chance it like a weed.
IN THE BARBER SHOP
The woman barber clips and combs and clips
a woman’s hair, always solicitous,
touching her customer with utmost care,
while at the footrest a loving husband kneels,
consoling his frail wife in Polish, holding
her trembling hands in his big, clement hands.
Why is the wife (so thin and aged) afraid?
Why is the barber holding back her tears?
A stroke maybe? Maybe long history
related in those calming, murmured words.
And even if you’ve seen such love before
there’s shame in having left it at the door,
in having thought too often of oneself
and present happiness. The husband pays
and wheels his whimpering, childlike wife outside
where winter sunlight strikes the anvil street,
and helicopter blades of light leap out
from windshields in the supermarket lot.
Now try to meet the barber’s eyes, and take
your seat and let her pin the collar on.
Her touch, all business, has a healing power
but not enough, or not enough for you.
And when you pay and leave and feel the cold,
the dicing blades of light will scatter you.
SARONG SONG
The woman in the blue sarong
bade me believe in ships.
Come sail with me, the journey’s long,
sang her alluring lips
that baited me in a net of words
and hauled me to her bed
at the top of the world where thieving birds
loved me till I bled.
I came from an underworld of snow,
she from a windy dune.
She dared to look for me below
the phases of the moon.
Come walk with me, the journey’s joy,
she sang with her blue eyes.
Untie the sarong, my bonny boy,
and bare me to the skies.
THE TARMAC
Lack, you say? The world will strip you naked.
Time you realized it. Too many years
you worked in a plush denial, head down,
dodging yourself as much as others.
Nobody did this to you.
Trained in deafness, you soon went blind,
but gathered strength for metamorphosis
in order to become your kind.
Now nothing helps but silence as you learn
slowly the letting go,
and learn again, and over again, again,
blow upon blow,
you must go by the way of mountain tides,
coral blizzards and the sunlit rain.
The wave of nausea heaves
and passes through the egocentric pain
and finds you on a tarmac going where
your skin and hair, eyes, ears and fingers feel
a change is in the air.
You are unfolding now, and almost real.
ANOTHER THING
Like fossil shells embedded in a stone,
you are an absence, rimmed calligraphy,
a mouthing out of silence, a way to see
beyond the bedroom where you lie alone.
So why not be the vast, antipodal cloud
you soloed under, riven by cold gales?
And why not be the song of diving whales,
why not the plosive surf below the road?
The others are one thing. They know they are.
One compass needle. They have found their way
and navigate by perfect cynosure.
Go wreck yourself once more against the day
and wash up like a bottle on the shore,
lucidity and salt in all you say.
LET IT GO
Earth, I walked on a trail of blooming dryad,
lay on a boulder, watching night come on,
the eager silhouetted limbs thrust up,
harmless night known first in a darker blue
then even darker to the dust of stars,
the far off traffic of a night-denying city,
the dogs calling, I thought, joyfully. Night,
harmless night when my love moves in her day
on the far side of Earth, an ocean away.
Today a friend called, his voice thick with grief
because he cannot stop himself from feeling,
because his joy and grief are the same chord
on the same bowed lyra. My friend is Greek, the lyra
no mere symbol but a mode of living, fire
in the night, cold water at dawn. And you, Earth,
have called out to us all our lives, in squall
and zephyr, flood and tidal wave, no one life
enough to hear the chord beyond belief.
Earth, I am learning mineral patience, moved
by the current of last night’s dreaming, this morning’s coffee.
Sometimes I hate you for coming between my love
and me, for being so large, so full of laws
and nations and money and people who cling to them all.
I know it is not your wish. I try to live
with animal resignation, grazing the weather,
alert for signs of danger. We’ve just begun,
my love and I, to meet beneath the sun.
We live each day in the shade of another life,
anonymous as all of space, or all
that passes under the canopy of leaves.
Earth, we cannot cling to you any more
than to each other. The life already over
is the one we love, the tears already shed,
the words already written, the magic drowned,
our feeling fire that sparks into the stars
while down below the ordinary cars
go on, abrasive and efficient commerce,
the houses glow and people lock their doors.
I’m shedding what I own, or trying to,
walking down the path of blooming dryad
and the pitch of pines, until I hear the stream
below me in the canyon, below the road,
below the traffic of ambition and denial,
the unclear water running to the sea,
the stream, dear Earth, between my love and me.
4 JULY 11
From over the ridge, chrysanthemums of fire
burst into color. One hears the pop-pop-pop
of another birthday, but the heart is flat champagne.
Who cares about freedom, and Damn King George?
Who cares about sirens out in city lights?
I’ve got enough to fight about right here,
the howitzer let loose inside my ribs,
the thudding ricochet from hill to hill,
from hurt to hurt. Hard birth. Hard coming to.
WHEN I DIDN’T GET THE NEWS
I was on the Welsh coast, off
St. David’s, on a bluff
looking down on the Atlantic
with Chrissy (chicken sandwiches,
strawberries and champagne
might have been the thing).
Instead, we drove
to the Snowdonian sunset
and returned to the full,
the rising moon.
I didn’t get the news,
but slowly through the night
slept out the sweat of ages
channeled like a current over stones,
and woke to a day as calm and ordinary
as a blur of hedgerow,
a sunlit quarter of portioned field.
Small roadside phalanxes of foxglove
marshaled me to peace.
And that was when,
long after it had happened,
I did get the news,
or my computer did,
the simple fact that you were dead
and that I’d missed the whole final drama
while in my life.
The day of sunlight on the swales
and lowing cattle, glowing coals
of hillside sheep,
the day of fantasies about the perfect hovel
on the hill, the day we would try
to keep,
that day was the day my mother died,
simple fact—a useful thing, that—
and became not here
across thousands of miles of sea
and air.
I tried to think of who you were,
and how you tried to tell me at the end
to let go the whole baggage of the past.
No sense in grinding it to sausage,
no sense in cooking it to the perfect
killing meal.
The particular you, the wry jokes
and walking stick, the book groups
and bad girls who loved you—
might as well let them in
as they were the ones who knew you best,
the beautiful blind and halt,
the whiskey-soaked and all the rest
forgiven as they had forgiven you.
14 JULY 11
Where does a life go? Can’t
answer that, can’t go
where the holy rollers go.
I like the clouds, though,
above the hills at Brecon.
As trees are clouds,
as blown roses
and my love too, all cloud,
all rain, I reckon.
SALMON LEAP
The only constant was the sound of water,
and we, gill-breathing moss
and learning love would be there when we sought her,
prepared ourselves for loss.
Wherever absences are crossed by day
without a touch or look,
whenever there is nothing we can say,
remember the talking brook.
There is no deeper sleep than in the stream,
however it may fall
or heave in tides upon a distant dream.
Whatever voices call,
our ashes will be washed away by rain
and we will speak aloud
the language of a watery refrain,
clear as any cloud.
THE DYING MAN
After a week a man in a brown suit
appeared at the foot of the bed. They talked
a language of sunlight inside window glass
while family eyed each other wonderingly.
I also stood by the bed and held his hand
and brushed his hair and touched his beard.
He smiled and said, No tears, but it’s good to see
old friends. In the kitchen women unwrapped food,
THE INSERT
Change planes, change lives,
and why should any memory intervene?
The bridge you crossed
from school the day before you turned fourteen,
and found, behind
Bart’s Mobil Station, two Lummi Indian girls
locked in a fight,
both grunting. One yanked the other’s ironed curls
and tried to hold
her blouse together over heavy breasts.
Screaming now,
the other bled from nose and mouth, thickening gouts
that smeared her face
and stained the first girl’s hands. You felt the hurt
and parted them
and stanched the bleeding with your balled-up shirt,
then walked away,
chilled in t-shirt, shouldering your bag of books.
And never saw
those girls again, except in sideways looks.
Change lives, change planes,
change anything you walk to or away from.
None of it stays
in place. None of it knows a trace of reason.
DIE WHEN YOU DIE
You, friend, have far to go. You cannot change
another and you cannot change yourself.
Let be. Weep when it is time for weeping,
laugh when laughter comes. No one else alive
will have a say in that.
ONE ANOTHER
What current between us
touches abandoned days
to the present of yes?
Your face on the pillow
rapt in a distant glow
of self-loss, undertow,
drawn out deeper than love—
how will the days evolve,
the evenings believe
that what we are, we may
be without asking why,
given without a way.
LEAVINGS
How naked, how bereft
that wall of picture hooks
where faces used to make me cringe,
how bare the shelves
unloaded of their library, how like
another life the furnace
sighs to an empty house,
the decades it took a dresser
to leave its carpet mark,
its unvacuumed blur of dust.
Of six who lived here once
four are dead.
They’ve gone out before us.
I close the door, haunted.
LOPSIDED PRAYER
Bluejoint, fescue, foxglove, bee-sipped daisies
sign to the breeze what its direction is.
The night bleeds into everything you see.
Oh please be you. And please let me be me.
A DEAFNESS
For days now at the mouth of the stream,
at the gray seam of gravel and sky,
a bald eagle has watched from pilings
kokanee moving inland to spawn.
The landlocked salmon dart past shallows
where he can feed, a lord at leisure.
They fan in alder-shadowed pools
until they die without a fight.
For we who cannot hear, this happens
with a more impartial love,
unruffled motion, like wet leaves
already fallen. No regret,
no whining need, no infant hurt,
nothing to say we’re sorry for,
no chance to try again. A sinking,
used and belly-up in the stream.
And we keep going back to listen
through the moving shadows, the glide
and turn of bodies we have known,
to the deep evaders of desire.
THE SOUL FOX
for Chrissy, 28 October 2011
My love, the fox is in the yard.
The snow will bear his print a while,
then melt and go, but we who saw
his way of finding out, his night
of seeking, know what we have seen
and are the better for it. Write.
Let the white page bear the mark,
then melt with joy upon the dark.
MRS. MASON AND THE POETS
At that point I had lived with Mr. Tighe
so many years apart from matrimony
we quite forgot the world would call it sin.
We were, in letters of our friends at Pisa,
Mr. and Mrs. Mason, the common name
domesticating the arrangement. (Our friends
were younger, thinking it a novelty.)
You’ve heard about Lord Byron and his zoo,
how he befriended geese he meant to eat
and how they ruled his villa like a byre
with peacocks, horses, monkeys, cats and crows.
And our friend Shelley whom we thought so ill,
whose brilliant wife was palely loitering,
waiting to give birth and dreading signs
that some disaster surely must befall them.
Shelley of the godless vegetable love,
pursuer of expensive causes, sprite.
He had confided in me more than once
how his enthusiasms caused him pain
and caused no end of pain to those he loved.
Some nights I see his blue eyes thrashing back
and comprehend how grieved he was, how aged.
Genius, yes, but often idiotic.
It took too many deaths, too many drownings,
fevers, accusations, to make him see
the ordinary life was not all bad.
I saw him last, not at the stormy pier
but in a dream. He came by candlelight,
one hand inside a pocket, and I said,
You look ill, you are tired, sit down and eat.
He answered, No, I shall never eat more.
I have not a soldo left in all the world.
Nonsense, this is no inn—you need not pay.
Perhaps it is the worse for that, he said.
He drew the hand out of his pocket, holding
a book of poems as if to buy his supper.
To see such brightness fallen broke my heart,
and then, of course, I learned that he had drowned.
Once, they say, he spread a paper out
upon a table, dipped his quill and made
a single dot of ink. That, he said,
is all of human knowledge, and the white
is all experience we dream of touching.
If I should spread more paper here, if all
the paper made by man were lying here,
that whiteness would be like experience,
but still our knowledge would be that one dot.
I’ve watched so many of the young die young.
As evening falls, I know that Mr. Tighe
will come back from his stroll, and he will say
to humour me, Why Mrs. Mason, how
might you have spent these several lovely hours?
And I shall notice how a slight peach flush
illuminates his whiskers as the sun
rounds the palms and enters at our windows.
And I shall say, As you have, Mr. Mason,
thinking of lost friends, wishing they were here.
And he: Lost friends? Then I should pour the wine.
And I? What shall I say to this kind man
but Yes, my darling, time to pour the wine.
MARCO POLO IN THE OLD HOTEL
Marco . . .
. . . Polo
Marco . . .
. . . Polo
Pour another glass of sunlight,
tasting an after-dinner hour.
This is not a time for reading.
Wait a while. A meteor shower
may fall about your head tonight
and children in a nearby pool
are laughing in late summer air,
happy to be free of school.
Marco . . .
. . . Polo
Marco . . .
. . . Polo
You are the only dinner guest.
The meal is finished, but the wine
will last until the dark arrives.
The children in the pool incline
their bodies, leaping from the waves,
their voices calling to each other,
traveling through the evenings, years
and decades of late-summer weather.
Marco . . .
. . . Polo
Marco . . .
. . . Polo
Across the parking lot a flag
is flapping, thin as Chinese silk
the camels caravanned through deserts.
Voices fall into the dark.
You breathe the last mouthful of wine
and seem to float into the air
as they call to eternity,
the un-enclosing everywhere:
Marco . . .
. . . Polo
Marco . . .
A SORT OF ORACLE
Late one afternoon between sun and rain
I found the path ascending above Delphi
toward a spring an old man said I would find,
not knowing whom to ask about my life,
the wrongs I may have done myself or others,
and when I’d climbed beyond the yapping dogs
and the last engines of commercial traffic,
I asked an almond tree, an oracle
as good as any, for some forgiving word.
One does these things when nothing else makes sense,
feeling a giddy madness. The tree said nothing,
the cloudy shafts of sunlight stabbed, withdrew,
the cuckoo called from olives down below
its two comedic notes. I found the spring
and drank from it and washed the sweat from my face,
then turned back to the town where friends were waiting.
THE BAY OF WRITING
And I with only a reed in my hands.
—George Seferis
The reed, dried and cut, could make a pan-pipe
on an idle day. I say the word again,
kalamus, that early pen, from breezy
leaf to leaves of nervy writing—Sappho,
Archilochos, their fingering lines,
a silent music till our voices find it.
In retrospect I walk among those trees,
polled mulberries no longer home to silkworms,
the crone-like olives, upright cypresses
above the hammered metal of the bay
called Kalamitsi. There the lazy hours
watching the ant roads through the summer straw
taught me the frantic diligence of mind,
the way it ferries breadcrumbs and small seeds
fast fast to its storehouse in reedy shade.
The way the hand rests on an open book
I’ve disappeared into, takes up a pen
and traces letters in a trail of words.
Kalamus, Kalamitsi, bay of reeds,
music of everything I have not written.
FOGHORNS
The loneliest days,
damp and indistinct,
sea and land a haze.
And purple foghorns
blossomed over tides—
bruises being born
in silence, so slow,
so out there, around,
above and below.
In such hurts of sound
the known world became
neither flat nor round.
The steaming tea pot
was all we fathomed
of is and is not.
The hours were hallways
with doors at the ends
opened into days
fading into night
and the scattering
particles of light.
Nothing was done then.
Nothing was ever
done. Then it was done.
TREE LIGHT HOUSE
That slow familiar breathing
is the sea, I remember now,
and rain in the green limbs.
I dreamed your body
warm in the doona,
your unquestioning hands,
and woke to find you
fevered but alive
to be grateful for.
A cigarette lighter
fished from the surf
still lit the candles
at our little feast.
Night drew in
about the house
and when we fell
into bed the sea
erased our names.
The fever will not leave.
It will teach us waiting.
I write by the light of the trees,
by moss and salal,
the black flash of raven wings,
by the slow mist
salting the window,
rain on a neighbor’s roof
reflecting.
Is it a form of prayer
or relinquishment,
this wish to be turning
away from tasks,
from the road with its string
of identical malls?
To be feeling again
the original touch
of the world?
When I was sick
my mother let me lie
about the house all day
and brought me ginger ale.
That’s when I learned
by staying home from school
to live in the dream-time
as animals live
deeper in the world.
Your body heals itself
through fever,
the rasp of your cough
like surf over gravel.
Let me bring you tea,
let me feed you,
let me rock you
to the sweet
consolation of dreams.
We live high up in the trees
where bright green warblers rustle
and flit, songbeats in the light
and shadow. Where ravens sail
among the Sitka spruces
to rendezvous on branches.
We live in the breathing clock of the sea,
the whalesong of memory.
Wake me here. Lighten me.
THE BLUE OF THE BAY
What can be learned from the blue of the bay
I do not know, I cannot say,
the stone of the sand on the shore by the bay.
The bird on its back lying dead on the shore,
its breast torn open, its hollow core—
what more can be learned of the bird on the shore?
If someone is crying, I cannot hear,
and if I am crying inside I fear
no one will hear, no one will hear.
The moon held fast in the undertow.
I felt it pulling me, strong and slow,
the long withdrawing undertow,
and climbed on a barnacled rock by the sea,
the eelgrass wrapped around my knee,
my skin scrubbed raw by the cold cold sea.
If I can sleep I will dream of the day
drowning the hours in the deep blue bay,
the stone of the sand on the shore by the bay.
SEA SALT
Light dazzles from the grass
over the carnal dune.
This too shall come to pass,
but will it happen soon?
A kite nods to its string.
A cloud is happening
above the tripping waves,
joined by another cloud.
They are a crowd that moves.
The sky becomes a shroud
cut by a blade of sun.
There’s nothing to be done.
The soul, if there’s a soul
moves out to what it loves,
whatever makes it whole.
The sea stands still and moves,
denoting nothing new,
deliberating now.
The days are made of hours,
hours of instances,
and none of them are ours.
The sand blows through the fences.
Light darkens on the grass.
This too shall come to pass.