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,
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.
And I am with them too.
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,
and in the garden everything was good.
THE INSERT
Change planes, change lives,
and why shoul
d 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.
Die when you die.
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.
As you are. That’s how I
would have you be
if I had any say.
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 a
ir,
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 . . .
. . . Polo
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.