Votaries of all casts and ages, genders, voices,
bow to you as they must, for nothing follows without you.
I once met a man in an iron lung, puffing his words,
and youth was a much-too-long parade of unfortunate data:
the infirm, the wizened, the washout, the accidental suicide . . .
An old man with a tinkling highball sat like a lord
orating, When I was a boy, and we knew a story was coming.
I never minded those times, being an odd duck
who actually listened, but the lesson I failed to get was the one
he always meant: One of these days, you smug twit,
you’ll be me.
Now my sage joints prophesy like rats
from a leaking ship, and every morning’s gulp of pills
pules in silent offering to Hygeia. Keep moving
until you stop. The hell with the good opinion of others.
Wisdom of age, goddess—the sort we laugh about
if lucky enough.
In dreams I’m still the boy who listens.
Others suffer sleepless nights, others find the day
too hard to climb, but climb to summits anyway.
Think of them, betrayed by their own bones or blood,
bent inside with maladies no one else can see,
for whom merely to walk a city block would be
a woozy flight.
So I’ve become a spinner of yarns—
hopefully not a sower of yawns—my hearing aids,
crow’s feet and specs, and all my hidden pangs and pains
pleading the Fifth before I find a fifth and pour
a neat inch at cocktail time. Look with thine ears,
said Lear to the world prolonging. Well, I’ve been there,
half-hearing my way through human mazes.
When I was a boy
I listened to men weathered and withered, withstanding all
the way they’d ducked at mortar fire or kamikazes,
and women who took my arm to make it to the car.
I chauffeured the old, cajoled them to keep up the work of living,
helped them to their doors, found keys, conveyed them
to dough-smelling kitchens, pans of foiled leftovers,
letters they’d never written, love they’d never conveyed,
whatever decay of night was left to wander in.
Now I’ve only to hallow their too-neglected names
with yours, goddess, each time I offer a lit candle
or swallow the pills and pride or raise my ringing glass.
THE NEW DOPE
It was softer on the throat,
harder on the heart.
Two tokes deep in the lungs
and I saw double,
troubled my friends, I didn’t feel
so well, so well.
It was a kind of hell
of harmlessness, except
the sad division of the world
I feared was permanent,
no longer sane or self,
no longer sole or whole
so long as brick streets multiplied
on the long, the short, the long drive home.
So long, I said. It took so long
to say So long.
Next day I was glad
that gravity was back, and this
abyss-less ordinary mug
of coffee in my hands.
DISTURBED PARADELLE
Do not repeat yourself.
Do not repeat yourself.
Habits are hard to break.
Habits are hard to break.
Repeat: Hard. Break. Habits
Are not to do yourself.
Why do you look that way?
Why do you look that way?
Am I so very strange to you?
Am I so very strange to you?
To look way strange, why that?
So you do. I am very you.
The days go slipping by.
The days go slipping by
Before you can catch them.
Before you can catch them.
Slipping before you go,
Catch them. Days. By the can.
Habits catch you slipping
By yourself. Look to th
Hard days. Am I to go?
Way before them, do not
Break. You repeat why so you are
That can do. Very strange.
THE GREAT CHANGER
Without a song to find a lover by,
some days she floated like a driftwood log,
beached at high tide beneath a dismal sky.
She was not Salmon Woman swimming under fog.
She was not Echo, nor was she Talking River.
She was not Thunder and she was not ever
the mouse who changed her skin for woman’s skin.
She was not Milky Way. She was not Moon.
She had to move a mountain with a spoon
and never ask forgiveness of the sun.
When change came it was a gradual dying.
She was not Owl Woman. This was not flying.
But she was Fox and found her gnawed-off limb
and the Great Changer came. And she welcomed him.
HORSE PEOPLE
When Quanah Parker’s mother as a young girl
saw her family lanced and hacked to pieces,
and was herself thrown on the hurtling rump
of a warrior’s pony whipped to the far off
and utterly unwritten Comancheria,
the little blonde began her life, outcast
only when the whites recaptured her and killed
the man she loved, the father of her children.
The language she forgot would call her ruined
and beyond redemption like the young she suckled,
among them the “last Chief of the Comanche,”
a man who died in comforts his mother spurned,
but who, like her, remembered how the manes
of the remuda caught the breezes as they ran,
and how the grass caught fire in the scalp-red sun.
SAND CREEK
The land flayed open like a skin
on which the stories would be drawn
The sky a turtled bowl, powdered
blue of a broken robin’s egg
and there beside the washboard road
where the wire fences lean and sing
rust-colored feathers of a hawk
a turret-turning beak and eye
I bend a knee
and lean on shatterings of rock
to watch a beetle right itself
and struggle into stems and weeds
a cricket like an autumn leaf
crackling in crooked flight
The compass draws around me blue
A whittled bone-white moon fades west
and there is unheard lamentation here
and there is blood, blood everywhere
the dried blood color of the weeds
the blood of recollection, true
or not true as the case may be
The hawk, the beetle and the rest
go on, the stream goes on, the trees
all offering, all lifted high
and opened like the land, the skin
with its evaporating stain.
FRANGIPANI
Cut blossoms floating in a bowl of water
are what they are. Someone saw and gathered
the pale white and yellow stars and leaned
intimately down. To know the fragile blooms
with breathing color is to be reborn
astir, astray, and happier than before.
They float to survive now, a mystery like the dead
wake up to in the cradle of the night,
flesh of frangipani sweetening the bed
between the mown grass and the Southern Cross,
and if the memory bleeds at such a loss
it’s only the cost of living with desire.
So let the sphinx moths hunting nectar there
where none exists be go-betweens for life,
purposefully duped. Let the perfume rise.
GALAHS IN THE WIND
The tents are coming loose,
whole households on a string
and no one knows just where
the children have run off to.
Oh joy, the limbs and leaves
are tearing like the waves.
We are galahs. Galahs in the wind!
The sunlight shouts and we
tsup-tsup in riotous flight.
The world is all a seed to eat,
a song to answer everywhere,
we must be everywhere
at once we must, we must
tsup-tsup to the sun
our flight beneath the blue
and endless racing heaven.
MY SCOTTISH GRANDMOTHER’S LOBOTOMY
The tool used hardly mattered.
The procedure could be done
even with a screwdriver
slipped in through the eye socket,
scraping pre-frontal tissue,
and what was lost—neurosis
or addiction, flights of high
or crashing spirits—mattered
to a world made calmer. Thus.
And thus it was, the patient
lost the village window she
had once crawled out of, fleeing
her carpenter father’s house,
lost the need to find escape,
pilfered morphine, syringes
slipped from hospital closets,
lost years of nurse’s training,
lost her own words—you might say
lost her mind, the part of her
those who loved her thought they loved,
got rid of now. The mad girl
wrecked and pinioned in a bed,
aired in a hospital chair,
out of it, mouthing drivel.
She lived that way for decades.
I never heard her accent,
her laughter, even a cough.
BILDUNGSROMAN
i. m. Seamus Heaney
Because for us all things were living
the night train could not pass unwatched—
the way it threw the forest shadows
spinning across our bedroom wall,
the way it shook the house, the way
the revving diesel blew its top—
so I climbed the metal ladder up
to the upper bunk to see the light
that cast the passing images,
and somehow slipped and stuck my foot
right through the bedroom window glass.
No cut but a shock of the real
and a brother’s mockery for trying
to see beyond, and a moment’s crying.
HANGMAN
A Big Chief tablet and a Bic
between us on the car’s back seat,
the scaffold drawn, and underneath
a code of dashes in a row
for seven letters. Part of a stick-figure
fixed to the noose’s O
for every letter missed, until
if I’m not careful my poor guy
will hang with x’s for his eyes.
My brother parlays his resource
for big boy words with taunting skill:
“It starts with d and rhymes with force.”
But I don’t know the word, don’t know
the wet world being slapped away
by wiper blades, or why the day
moved like an old stop-action film
or an interrupted TV show
about a family on the lam.
I let myself be hanged, and learn
a new word whispered out of fear,
though it will be another year
before I feel the house cut loose,
my dangling body and the burn
of shame enclosing like a noose.
SECURITY LIGHT
The glow outside our window is no fallen star.
It is futility itself. It is the fear of night
a neighbor burns with, nightmare of a stubborn child.
I dreamed of chasing crows in a dark of sea fog
and no wind, the chill smell of kelp and changing things,
knowing the sea’s edge and the sand met where the fish lived.
I saw the waters running out to meet the water
coming in, the small crabs lifted off their claws.
I saw the trysting place of cormorants, the cliffs
of guarded nests where eagles watched like sated kings
alive, alive at the moving sand clock of the sea
where all’s dissolved, where earth itself is taken down.
THE STUDENT
Just hours before he went to hang himself
he smiled at me and promised poems would come,
He lived. But in fractions. A feeding tube
uncoiling from his abdomen. His aunt
and mother held him still to shave his face.
I bent and kissed the boy. He mouthed the air
and murmured what we hoped was meaning speech.
He wasn’t fully made when he strung up
his life. His instrument was still untuned.
That was a year ago. Word comes of struggle,
as if a strangled soul would find the strength
to love what wasn’t wholly there before,
only the promised happiness of song
beyond the comprehension of the mind.
What else could explain the effort to crawl back
among the living, for whom speech is easy
but understanding never comes in peace?
OLD MAN WALKING
The old man walking on the road
alone, with stark trees and a sky
as gray-white as his heavy head,
had lifted many a thought on high,
had lifted them to dream-head trees,
the witnesses of all the weight
dropping the old man to his knees
when no one saw him in the night.
Days when he did not dare to write,
the black dog for his only friend,
he stepped out on the road, the white
unwritten sky without an end.
An old man never walks alone.
Let others judge what others see.
The old man walking on the road
had words to keep him company.
PASSION
It isn’t the choir of small boys, casting about, singing shyly or with perfect oval mouths,
and it isn’t the gentle rocking solo on the violin
played by a man who’d sooner mooch a meal from anyone than pay,
and it isn’t the lovely rapture of the cellist who, between her legs and in the fluent embrace of her arms,
gives birth to a god who makes the audience tremble,
and it isn’t the white-haired athlete marking time with his stick and coaxing the lot of them to music,
and it isn’t the long-dead Lutheran Kapellmeister who built this temple of sound with a crew of amateurs,
and it isn’t the packed house too eager to spring to its feet in applause,
or the flaws of performance, or the whole tragic lift of the night as the story surges to its close.
It is all of them. And it passes. And will never be heard again on earth.
THE SHOW
At first you can almost believe
by the breeze in the outdoor café’s slender trees
and the family outing atmosphere
among the approving people gathered here
the night will turn to poetry,
but the angry man at the microphone
appears to think that he and he alone
by virtue of his earnest shout
can turn opinions into art.
One longs for a quiet thought
no one applauds,
and words that are not clods.
MICHAEL DONAGHY 1954–2004
Like a wash of paint on board, transparent figures,
unsolid as shadows and the passing river . . .
I look at them, and look again, again—
a lifetime passing in a shower of rain.
WE STAND TOGETHER TALKING
We stand together talking, like making love
in a burning city where forsaken love
hurls stones and bullets, and the livid face
declares it never had a stake in love.
Where love requires denying other love
like hammers driving nails in, breaking love.
From sleep I find you rising from your sleep
and kiss your eyes, so full of aching love.
My love, the harm was hidden, but the hate
would damn us living for the sake of love.
EPIGRAM
The baby’s bawling and the old man’s laughter
rise from the center of the same I am.
Say it to windows, doors. Say it to rafters
on rivers of light. Say it to the breaking dam.
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.