from
{ 2014 }
for Addie & Mack
GO SWEETLY
KNOW I LOVE YOU
Behind his house, my father’s dogs
sleep in kennels, beautiful,
he built just for them.
They do not bark.
Do they know he is dead?
They wag their tails
& head. They beg
& are fed.
Their grief is colossal
& forgetful.
Each day they wake
seeking his voice,
their names.
By dusk they seem
to unremember everything—
to them even hunger
is a game. For that, I envy.
For that, I cannot bear to watch them
pacing their cage. I try to remember
they love best confined space
to feel safe. Each day
a saint comes by to feed the pair
& I draw closer
the shades.
I’ve begun to think of them
as my father’s other sons,
as kin. Brothers-in-paw.
My eyes each day thaw.
One day the water cuts off.
Then back on.
They are outside dogs—
which is to say, healthy
& victorious, purposeful
& one giant muscle
like the heart. Dad taught
them not to bark, to point
out their prey. To stay.
Were they there that day?
They call me
like witnesses & will not say.
I ask for their care
& their carelessness—
wish of them forgiveness.
I must give them away.
I must find for them homes,
sleep restless in his.
All night I expect they pace
as I do, each dog like an eye
roaming with the dead
beneath an unlocked lid.
It’s a wonder the world
keeps its whirling—
How I’ve waited
without a word—
Staring where
the sun’s no longer—
You gone
into ether, wherever
You want
to call it. Soon
Sun won’t fight
off the cold
But today warm
even in the rain.
Whatever the well
you want me
To fall down I will—
Meet me by the deepest
part of the river
And we’ll drown together
wading out past
All care, beyond even
the shore’s hollers.
It was a ghost
town, a town
not of the dead
but the deserted—
once thriving—a hospital
named not for a saint
nor Women & Children—
whoever’s first—but for the city
where you’d been flown
for now. The help desk
was no help. You
were somewhere
else, already your body lost
in the basement dark,
where, if you had eyes
left, they soon would adjust
& you could see.
The last to see you
being helped
to breathe
was your friend the Judge
I asked over the phone
to look in on you
in your next-
to-last room, to make sure
the rehearsed nurse
told the truth. Your brain
dead, body a machine—
It’s bad,
he said, acting
as my eyes. Yours
I soon would give—
flown here to retrieve
your effects
from a chilly teller,
this banker of bodies.
Well below
in the morgue, the walls
of the dead in their safe
deposit boxes—
your wallet handed back
signed for, unspent. What
was left. The lobby
like a cathedral bombed
but whose rose
window still shone—
me a prisoner released
too early, on furlough,
with nowheres
to go. Outside
strangely spring
but cold—on break,
nurses in their abstract
expressionist shirts
huddled & shared
cigarettes, exhaling
thick halos of smoke.
Strange how you keep on
dying—not once
then over
& done with—or for—
if not every day
anymore, each morning
a sabbath of sundering,
then hours still arrive
I realize nothing
can beg you back—
nor return to us days
without harm, heaven
only an idea. Hell not yet
that week
I couldn’t bear to sleep
in your half-life house
& my future
wife & I stayed
at the Worst
Western, the phone
ringing early, & late,
too late. I’d wake
& you’d be there, gone—
retreating
to the bleak bathroom
& its heat lamp, perched
on the edge
of the empty tub, I’d try
not to write.
How terrible
to have to pick up
the pen, helpless
to it, your death
not yet
a habit & try to say
something other than
never, or hereafter,
to praise among the tile—
not your dying—
but having
been alive. The pale bathroom
whose light burnt on, red
as a darkroom,
ticking down—
your eulogy dashed out
among the tiny
broken soap, each day
shrinking, slivered
in our hands. Come late
afternoon, the distant, wet slaps
of children poolside
crying out
in laughter—their muffled
watery shrieks echoing after.
On line for the plane
a woman carried her heart
on her lap & I thought
could it be yours
she held tight? It wasn’t
her heart yet
of course, was her future
heart, I guess, soon
inside her beating
after being dead
on the table, a minute
or two, during surgery
in a hospital named Mercy.
For now, wheeled
alongside her, her almost
heart sat labeled
& tucked in its red chest
of ice. I thought
I could be her
holding you, hoping
there was enough life left in you
to help me
again breathe.
I knew full well
you were not there,
father, that it was your liver
lifted out of you
& set like a bloody stone
inside somebody
else to save. After being
checked for danger, just
beyond the glass doors,
I watched
a farmer father
& mother send off
their plaid son
the first time he’d flown,
everyone wiping their eyes
& waving.
In the night I brush
my teeth with a razor
So many socks.
After the pair
the undertaker asks for
(I picture them black
beneath the fold
in your open casket,
your toes still cold)
what else to do.
Body bags
of old suits, shirts
still pressed, long
johns, the unworn,
unwashed wreckage
of your closet, too many
coats to keep, though I will save
so many. How can I
give away the last
of your scent? And still,
father, you have errands,
errant dry cleaning to pick up—
yellow tags whose ghostly
carbon tells a story
where to look. One
place closed
for good, the tag old.
One place with none
of your clothes,
just stares as if no one
ever dies, as if you
are naked somewhere,
& I suppose you are.
Nothing here.
The last place knows exactly
what I mean, brings me shirts
hanging like a head.
Starched collars
your beard had worn.
One man saying sorry, older lady
in the back saying how funny
you were, how you joked
with her weekly. Sorry—
& a fellow black man hands
your clothes back for free,
don’t worry. I’ve learned death
has few kindnesses left.
Such is charity—so rare
& so rarely free—
that on the way back
to your emptying house
I weep. Then drive
everything, swaying,
straight to Goodwill—
open late—to live on
another body
& day.
I am no longer ashamed
how for weeks, after, I wanted
to be dead—not to die,
mind you, or do
myself in—but to be there
already, walking amongst
all those I’d lost, to join
the throng singing,
if that’s what there is—
or the nothing, the gnawing—
So be it. I wished
to be warm—& worn—
like the quilt my grandmother
must have made, one side
a patchwork of color—
blues, green like the underside
of a leaf—the other
an old pattern of the dolls
of the world, never cut out
but sewn whole—if the world
were Scotsmen & sailors
in traditional uniforms.
Mourning, I’ve learned, is just
a moment, many,
grief the long betrothal
beyond. Grief what
we wed, ringing us—
heirloom brought
from my father’s hot house—
the quilt heavy tonight
at the foot of my marriage bed,
its weight months of needling
& thread. Each straightish,
pale, uneven stitch
like the white hairs I earned
all that hollowed year—pull one
& ten more will come,
wearing white, to its funeral—
each a mourner, a winter,
gathering ash at my temple.
The cookies his neighbors brought by
didn’t taste like pity—
at my father’s house
for the first time, after, the locks
broken into, now new, when cross
the street comes
a neighbor, cookies shrouded
in tinfoil, a plate
I need not return.
How long had the pair
kept vigil out the window
for someone to set foot here
so they might make their offering?
Had they begun baking
soon as they heard, knowing
full well the dead
& those closest to them
grow hungry?
Like bread
the body rising.
Inside, his house filled
with what killed him—
a dozen turkey decoys deflating,
bright empty shells.
Another kind soul had taped a tarp
over his open sunroof top.
Disarray, the rest. Who knows
what goes where? After
all, it is dirt we return to—or fire
we devour—the pool
we once swam out back
now drained, flooding the street
in mock calamity—no longer
the filter sucking
its lower lip & teeth
like a child trying
hard not to weep.
May God or whoever else
spare you
the arms of bereavement
specialists—
grant mercy from the Team
dedicated to your transition
in this difficult time
yet who won’t tell you
a thing & know far less.
Those innocent, interminable,
polite, unreachable
voices over the phone—
do not suffer those—
they are unlike death
who does not ask
or give one whit
for your death certificate
they need
duplicates of.
No, originals.
No, now three letters
of testamentary
six pounds of flesh—
whatever’s left.
Hell is not a live
voice—just listen
to the complete menu
as our options have changed.
Press One
for Purgatory.
Two for shame.
Three to get ready
Four for blame.
Five years
of phone calls to sort
your death out—
& one day, the avenging angel
of telemarketing leaves
a message not asking
after you, but acting
as if you & she
had spoken, today—
Paul, just wanted
to get back to you
about the cruise.
My response
was what the afterlife
must be like—
quick, mean, a piece
of my mind & passing
along no peace—
just righteousness—if ever
she called back
I said, I’d kill her—
& not with kindness
as does the phone.
Better to go it alone.
The day will come
when you’ll be dead longer
than alive—thankfully
not soon.
There are of course years
long before, without you
breathing—and your years
without me even
an idea. Then there are those
infant months, when I knew
your voice, your bearded
face, not your name—
at least to speak
it aloud. And in the night,
father, I cried out
and in the day—
like now.
Grave, my wife lies back, hands cross
her chest, while the doctor searches early
for your heartbeat, peach pit, unripe
plum—pulls out the world’s worst
boombox, a Mr. Microphone, to broadcast
your mother’s lifting belly.
The whoosh and bellows of mama’s body
and beneath it: nothing. Beneath
the slow stutter of her heart: nothing.
The doctor trying again to find you, fragile
fern, snowflake. Nothing.
After, my wife will say, in fear,
impatient, she went beyond her body,
this tiny room, into the ether—
for now, we spelunk for you one last time
lost canary, miner of coal
and chalk, lungs not yet black—
I hold my wife’s feet to keep her here—
and me—trying not to dive starboard
to seek you in the dark water. And there
it is: faint, an echo, faster and further
away than mother’s, all beat box
and fuzzy feedback. You are like hearing
hip-hop for the first time—power
hijacked from a lamppost—all promise.
You couldn’t sound better, break-
dancer, my favorite song bumping
from a passing car. You’ve snuck
into the club underage and stayed!
Only later, much, will your mother
begin to believe your drumming
in the distance—our Kansas City
and Congo Square, this jazz band
vamping on inside her.
She sleeps on the side
her heart is on—
sleeps facing the sun
that juts through our window
earlier and earlier. In the belly
of the sky the sun kicks
and cries. My wife
has begun to wear the huge
clothes of inmates, smuggling you
inside her—son
or daughter. I bring her
crackers and water.
Wardens of each other,
in the precincts
of unsteady sleep, we drift
off curled
like you are, listening
to the night breathe.
More like
a flicker, a far-
off flutter
beneath my
broad hand—
then, two
weeks later,
a nudge, a knee
as you elbow
round inside—
acrobat, apple
of our eye
we can’t
yet see. You seed
my mind
with nicknames,
Buddy. Junior,
you drift
like an astronaut
tethered silver
to the mothership.
You are even better
than fruit
floating in Jell-O!
We cannot wait
to welcome you
with ticker tape—
no slap—
when at last you arrive
and find life
on our puny planet.
I believe birth a lengthy process
meant to help us believe
in the impossible.
I believe the body knows
more than we do.
I believe pregnancy is meant
to teach us patience,
then impatience. To ready
for what cannot be.
I believe it does not matter
what I believe.
I believe aches now,
heartbreak later.
I believe the body is meant
to emerge from another body,
to merge with it.
I believe that the body begins
far outside the skin.
I believe in you mewling my name
until it is yours,
then mine again.
I believe that heat can stay
with us for days,
that cold is only an instant,
then always.
Now that knowing means nothing,
now that you are more born
than being, more awake
than awaited, since I’ve seen
your hair deep inside mother,
a glimpse, grass in late
winter, early spring, watching
your mother’s pursed, throbbing,
purpled power, her pushing
you for one whole hour, two,
almost three, almost out,
maybe never, animal smell
and peat, breath and sweat
and mulch-matter, and at once
you descend, or drive, are driven
by mother’s body, by her will
and brilliance, by bowel,
by wanting and your hair
peering as if it could see, and I saw
you storming forth,
taproot, your cap of hair half
in, half out, and wait, hold
it there, the doctors say, and
she squeezing my hand, her face
full of fire, then groaning your face
out like a flower, blood-bloom,
crocused into air, shoulders
and the long cord still rooting
you to each other, to the other
world, into this afterlife
amongst us living, the cord
I cut like an iris, pulsing,
then you wet against mother’s chest
still purple, not blue, not yet
red, no cry,
warming now, now opening
your eyes midnight
blue in the blue black dawn.
We are not born
with tears. Your
first dozen cries
are dry.
It takes some time
for the world to arrive
and salt the eyes.
It’s hard being
human. This morning yellow
overtook you, a thousand
yolks broken beneath
your skin. Splotches
of red, and you not rousing,
drowsy, listless—your head dips
like a drunk’s, or a duck
in a shooting gallery. Wrung,
we ring and bring you to a doctor
whose worried brown face
I try hiding from your mother—
she weeps over your body
mottled, bare, losing weight—
your black, burnt-
looking belly button, even
your feet flushed.
What color
should you be?
Hard to say
my black-eyed
susan, barely born, the flowers
brought by you
and last week’s visitors
freshly cut, bowed in water.
Tomorrow maybe
we’ll breathe.
For now we worry
the waiting room, watch
the clock wind us—
television showing the anniversary
of September’s calamities
that seem worlds away
and yesterday.
You roll to the nursery
to tan under blue light
we pray will bake
the poison out. In fever
your body burns
like a martyr. Pietà,
hothouse hope, you rise up
hours later—lighter
and darker too. The yellow
leaving you. Eyes
still not white
but opening slow. What color
should you be?
After mama nurses
you, I feed you formula
on doctor’s orders, color
of buttermilk, eggnog
maybe—saying
wake up, the almost
milk everywhere spilling.
It never ends, the bruise
of being—messy,
untimely, the breath
of newborns uneven, half
pant, as they find
their rhythm, inexact
as vengeance. Son,
while you sleep
we watch you like a kettle
learning to whistle.
Awake, older,
you fumble now
in the most graceful
way—grateful
to have seen you, on your own
steam, simply eating, slow,
chewing—this bloom
of being. Almost beautiful
how you flounder, mouth full, bite
the edges of this world
that doesn’t want
a thing but to keep turning
with, or without you—
with. With. Child, hold fast
I say, to this greening thing
as it erodes
and spins.
What blossoms
is loss—
last year’s ash
fills a tin from the grill
that fed us all
last summer like a father—
that black belly
rusty, its grate
you scrape, hopefully not too clean—
the past where
taste lives,
seasoning—sudden weeds
taller than even
you dreamed, bending
bare arms to the earth
to yank them out by their hair.
The hollies finally
given up on—
the dead harder
to root out than
you’d think, worms
weaving round the dirt
black, lush, clinging—
the ferns somehow returned,
planted in that heat wave
last summer, remember, sweat
stinging the eyes, wilting—
now their green
palms wide open
in offering. The steady
consolation of things
returning—lilac
and dogwood, sweet woodruff, even
the stones shine
in the sun. White blooms
soon gone—
soothing thud
of the neighbor girl playing
catch, catgut kissing leather
or missed, the ball landing soft
in our yard’s
deep grass—so sorry
for your loss—only the tulips
refusing to rise
this spring, stung
by the freezer all winter
we kept them in.
Like any good son, mine
still tends the dirt, watering
the bulbs long after
they’re done—with his little cup
tries to fill the darkness up.
I hunted heaven
for him.
No dice.
Too uppity,
it was. Not enough
music, or dark dirt.
I begged the earth empty
of him. Death
believes in us whether
we believe
or not. For a long while
I watch the sound
of a boy bouncing a ball
down the block
take its time
to reach me. Father,
find me when
you want. I’ll wait.
Every pore mourns.
Not the brain, nor
the chest where bereavement
nests, but the body, whole—
how it burns.
The ache of new bone
being grown.
That summer the faith
of a fever bent me
to my knees. Or flat
on my aching back, shivering
like a tree. I cannot keep anything
down all week. I thrush
& thrash, quarantined, thirst
to know what’s happening
among the rooms
of the living.
Bedridden, I can barely see
the clear, glacial lake
where tiger mussels swept upstream
by boat & accident
cut the feet, devouring
everything, like grief,
till there’s no more—
which, next year, is what
they’ll be—like my father
is already.
Sharper than stone
or woe, the mussels soon
will eat themselves
into extinction—
two summers
later, floating far
from the shore—
you cannot mourn
forever—my infant son will cry
with delight while passed,
kicking, between our
watery hands. For now,
the ashen world without him
has come to live,
unspoken, a sore
along my tongue—
swollen like an adder
whose prey takes weeks
to devour. My skin
on fire, wished
to be shed—or molting,
swallowing stone.
My soon hollow bones.
They shine in me a light.
I lie still,
transported into the white
hum, naked beneath
a shroud, while they sift
& read my blood.
It’s mum. No one
can name
what’s sought
to undo me this season—
some bug, locust god,
or hex? The dead
crouched on my chest.
Autumn now all
around us, the abscess
slow erodes—
of life there’s always
only less.
Even healing
hurts. Our bodies
leave us little
choice—scars
that way are ruthless—
what’s mended
stitched stronger
than what gaped
there before. So this
is what
it means to mourn:
the horse pills
I choke back
for weeks—like the food
you must down them with—
are almost more
painful than whatever
they cure.
Lips cracked open
like an egg, half-dead,
all night I toss & churn—
featherless bird
its mother feeds
from her own mouth—
maw of what sustains
that almost
swallows
us whole—
the pain newborn
& ravenous, fledgling,
then flown.
It’s supposed to be beautiful tomorrow
should be New England’s motto.
Instead it’s Shut up & drive.
Or, I never met a lane
I didn’t like. Often two at the same time.
Once I watched, while the rest
of us pulled over, someone drive past
then turn left—crash—
into a flashing ambulance.
At least she used
a turn signal.
So when we lost the wanted, not-
yet child, it was supposed to be
nice outside
but wasn’t. Inside the baby
we already had cried
to be read to—
my wife listing room to room.
In brisk, unbloomed April
only the crocus have pulled through.
Tomorrow yard waste
pickup resumes, my helpful
neighbor reminds me—I recollect
last fall’s late leaves in sacks
mostly torn behind the house
where all winter they sat,
half preserved, half rot.
Our lawn mostly mud, I lug
the damp, heavy bags—
unwieldy as a body given
six months of winter,
or more—& of course,
or luckily, only
one split. The black
leaves spilling their ink
across the still-brown lawn.
By glove & shovel I shove
the loam into another bag—
IDEAL FOR COMPOSTING SELF—
which, on its own, weighted
along the curb, doesn’t manage
to stand. The dead leaves
lean there for weeks,
fraying, a reminder of all
we get wrong, & fate—
turns out I was too early—
before men come at dawn one day
& whisk everything away.
I wake early to join
the others dying
of sweat, or breath, trying
to return to the bodies
we once owned—
slow going on a quick
track. We orbit
the fake grass, sun
already high enough to burn
the eyes or arms, windmilling
for all it’s worth.
We keep finding ourselves
in each other’s way—silent
we spin, a cavalcade
of future pain. And then,
in the blue beside
the ring, up springs
a proper parade—
traffic lined up & ashen
veterans, three left,
bow their heads
while names are read—
is that a prayer
I can’t make out
above the quick trinity
of rifle fire, smoke
clouding the air?
None flinch.
We keep pace along
with our shortening shadows,
every ache a wish.
The dogs ate what we did
only days
later. Like angels
they roam the countryside
belonging to no one.
And everyone.
We feed them like sorrow
to keep them at bay
& to make them stay.
Like heaven we begin
to expect them each day—
put out a cracked plate
just in case. Like the dead
they are impossible
to tame.
Your love, Two-headed cow
—R.E.M.
We were west of it,
home I mean, and I was trying
near Death Valley
to write a poem called Heaven
and failing. Impossible,
Paradise—
which is why
we keep reaching.
Instead, the desert
we’d soon enter,
windows down, driving, the heat
blowing us drier
than ever, shirt soaked through.
We’d stopped earlier to see
the sheep with two faces
who lived only an hour—
a six-legged steer
and the World’s Largest
Prairie Dog. Which wasn’t
ever alive, but worth the price.
It was almost autumn—
sturgeon moon
lifting above the mountains
and mesas—even its light
seemed full of heat.
Paradise was promise,
the poem thankfully lost.
All signs read: Here
was fought the battle
no one won.
Thinner then, I believed
in something moving beyond
the wind. What
did I know then
of extinction? It was all
I wrote about.
Envy the dead—
the flowers, their unmade beds.
How well they dress.
Here I was writing a poem
called Heaven
actually about the earth.
It shook beneath us.
Almost there, windmills
rose up
out of the desert,
churning, rowing
the very air
they made power
out of, and for—
an unseen that made them
move, and mean.
I have tried telling this before—
how the light stabbed its way
out of the clouds, rays
aimed everywhere—
no, it was the earth that day
drawing light out of the sky,
heavy, gravity pulling
the light to rest on its chest,
a ladder leaning—
in the valley north of the City
of Angels, mountains around us,
my passenger a twin, one
half of two, their mother
killed a year
or so before, helicopter
catching a power line—
gone—and I, knowing nothing
then, or too much, said
little, maybe sorry
which isn’t all
you can say, but mostly—
though I didn’t know that then—
and we were fighting
with my warbling tape deck,
no doubt, when we saw it—
tumbling, end
over end across the highway,
a car flipping and spitting up
dust and God knows
what else—midair—
and almost before I could reach
the shoulder, my friend out
across the lanes, racing
to the crumpled car,
to his mother—even then
I knew it was her he hoped
to meet—instead, in the scorched
grass of the median, a spare
or spared shoe, books flapping
their wings, and a man, dazed, somehow
thrown clear—
kneeling. We were not
the first, already some off-duty nurse
or Samaritan beside him, within
seconds, asking
what I should have—are you
alright? He held
no answers, no tongue
for where he had just
been, almost stayed, the car turtled
over on its back, its brokenness
that could be
our bodies, not yet
our lives—or his—and my friend
the twin almost there in time,
me slow behind, the last
of the first—scared to see—
looking on in horror
and wonder, clothes tossed
everywhere now no one would wear—
the broken mirrors missing
bodies they once
were conjoined to—
closer than they appear—
a blinding, splintered sky
helpless we soon would turn
and sail off under.
Back there then I lived
across the street from a home
for funerals—afternoons
I’d look out the shades
& think of the graveyard
behind Emily Dickinson’s house—
how death was no
concept, but soul
after soul she watched pour
into the cold
New England ground.
Maybe it was the sun
of the Mission,
maybe just being
more young, but it was less
disquiet than comfort
days the street filled with cars
for a wake—
children played tag
out front, while the bodies
snuck in the back. The only hint
of death those clusters
of cars, lights low
as talk, idling dark
as the secondhand suits
that fathers, or sons
now orphans, had rescued
out of closets, praying
they still fit. Most did. Most
laughed despite
themselves, shook
hands & grew hungry
out of habit, evening
coming on, again—
the home’s clock, broke
like a bone, always
read three. Mornings or dead
of night, I wondered
who slept there & wrote letters
I later forgot
I sent my father, now find buoyed up
among the untidy
tide of his belongings.
He kept everything
but alive. I have come to know
sorrow’s
not noun
but verb, something
that, unlike living,
by doing right
you do less of. The sun
is too bright.
Your eyes
adjust, become
like the night. Hands
covering the face—
its numbers dark
& unmoving, unlike
the cars that fill & start
to edge out, quiet
cortège, crawling, half dim, till
I could not see to see—
from BOOK OF HOURS
The light here leaves you
lonely, fading
as does the dusk
that takes too long
to arrive. By morning
the mountain moving
a bit closer to the sun.
This valley belongs
to no one—
except birds who name
themselves by their songs
in the dawn.
What good
are wishes, if they aren’t
used up?
The lamp of your arms.
The brightest
blue beneath the clouds—
We guess
at what’s next
unlike the mountain
who knows it
in the bones, a music
too high
to scale.
The burnt,
blurred world
where does it end—
The wind
kicks up the scent
from the stables
where horseshoes hold
not just luck but
beyond. But
weight. But a body
that itself burns,
begs to run.
The gondola quits just
past the clouds.
The telephone poles
tall crosses in the road.
Let us go
each, into the valley—
turn ourselves
& our hairshirts
inside out, let the world
itch—for once—
The sun’s small fury
feeds me.
Wind dying down.
We delay, & dither,
then are lifted
into it, brightness
all about—
O setting.
O the music
as we soar
is small, yet sating.
What you want—
Nobody, or nothing
fills our short journeying.
Above even the birds,
winging heavenward,
the world is hard
to leave behind
or land against—
must end.
I mean to make it.
Turning slow beneath
our feet,
finding sun, seen
from above,
this world looks
like us—mostly
salt, dark water.
You could spend
a lifetime hoping
to mend the moon.
Tonight let’s try—
bent to the fallen
needles, the pines, my hands
weaving
& wanting.
The half-moon
of your heart.
The stars are
so far.
Their light even
death does not end,
late arrives—
they bear
up the world
by their strings
& by example.
Shut your eyes.
The mantle
of midnight grown
light along my shoulder.
Each star a stone
in the river of sky—
the Milky Way’s bright tide
wringing me awake.
The few fields
forgive you—
give way to valleys
inside the mind
that themselves fill
with wildflowers—
brown-eyed susans
swaying, saying
something to the bees
about beginning
about being
patient & what is
beyond all this—
it is always the bloom,
that undoing,
does me in.
The dogwood we planted
for my son
now dying—
But it is not the autumn
I mean to mention.
Nor the winter
that has overcome
the air just today,
11th November, & because
I can name it, the end,
I will.
Still, the bent wood
of a chair, indoors, will
hold you, the small green
leftover from summer
will raise you up long
as it can, long
as you don’t fight it.
Being means believing,
if only what we don’t
know yet—
this quiet, coming,
rare & rarer, but still
there, below
the buzzing, just there,
opened after
the white of winter’s letters.
How to listen
to what’s gone—
To moan & learn—
The geese don’t
seem to mind
winter anymore—stay
put & graze.
No more their calls
against the dusk.
Nor their arrows
silhouetted against
this tintype sky—
its silver face, once
touched, begins
to fade fingerprint-grey.
Letters
I’ve never sent.
This life
we’re only renting.
Battered the world is—
bartered—
wander over it,
the stars finding
us wanting.
Does the wind wonder
about us—
the way it blows
the blossoms down
it must—the birds start
their bargaining early
before we awaken
& do our own—
which may
be too late.
The bare beach
in winter.
Dogs in the distance,
the frozen whitecaps.
How far could we walk
across that water?
Gulls like vultures
eddy above.
Nearer, the hours
are ours to make
the most of—
or to learn,
with practice, to relent.
Scars grow
smaller.
So too, the future—
Rest, I said.
Remain—
Return,
begs the wind
circling what won’t
stay put.
Bodies are built
to fail. To fall
& only once
in a while, to rise.
Otherwise, end.
Otherwise, fade
with the light.
Other arms
will lift you up, I know,
carry you crying
to my grave.
The weeds & weather will
sing my name.
Look away.
Let them let me down
without you watching.
Sunflowers.
Their heads seek the sun—
or bend without one
even after cut—
angling in the water
toward what
brightness we borrow.
It’s death there
is no cure for—
life the long
disease.
If we’re lucky.
Otherwise, short
trip beyond.
And below.
Noon,
growing shadow.
I chase the quiet
round the house.
Soon the sound—
wind wills
its way against
the panes. Welcome
the rain.
Welcome
the moon’s squinting
into space.
The trees
bow like priests.
The storm lifts
up the leaves.
Why not sing.