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
to a new thought, another chance at waking.
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
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.
&nbs
p; 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
w
here 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