Poem for June, 2018

I Wear My Father

I’ve made his amber after-shave last out
through this whole year of missing him;
I wear my father’s cardigan.
I swear I’m turning into him,
 
saying ‘Yupyupyup’ to the puppy
as I bend to leash him, breathing harder,
pursing my lips as memories crowd my head,
settling my hat on firmly as I leave.
 
The other day, though, on the icy creek,
as a heron rose up from a crosswise trunk
I slipped and slid against the snowy bank,
cracked through the ice sheet, up to one knee.
 
The dog looked rightly puzzled. As for dad,
he’d not have been that dumb, I tell myself,
making my aging foolishness keep me
younger, somehow, and singular.

. . . . . . . . . . . . .from Black Lab (2006)

Poem for May, 2018

Two Trips to Ireland

1
Well-eye, gazing at daytime stars,
rain-speckle, patches of blooming mists,
a hillside white with water-spill,
a shower blowing inland at the coast . . .
 
All this water must mean something!
 
 
2
Long deserted glens in the Wicklow Hills
and an axe, buried in a tree so long
only the tip of the handle shows.
 
 
3
The small hotel in Gort, ale and roast lamb,
the midday drowse. Who breathed this air?
Who climbed these stairs? Time floats,
one face of a diamond, scraps of paper in the street.
 
 
4
From these ruined beehive huts
on the bright slope you can see
half the Dingle and
the distant winking sea.
 
Monks, who had to be
gone in the head.
Where’s their god now?
Look closer at the cross-eyed pup
that followed you up this slant pasture,
the heifer that kneels, gazing out
on miles of sun and rain-washed air.
 
 
5
And the wind, a mind that’s never still,
with its black thoughts, the rooks at Cashel,
its white thoughts, the sea gulls at New Grange,
all this tossing and cawing among great ruins.
 
 
6
Lisadell: cracks, tatters, stains.
An old lady in gumboots
shepherds a handful of tourists;
from an upstairs window
you strain to see the past,
horses like swans, peacocks on gravel,
cloudburst at four and dress for dinner . . .
 
Night fog. Ghosts in the garden,
ghosts on the stair,
ghost of an old fiddler, air threading the air.
 
 
7
On a back road by a tower
a movie crew. Arthurians lunching.
Why not? Time-levels mix like bones
in pasture-battlefield, bog-shrine.
Iseult still boils spuds for the pig
and Tristan, cutting turf, turns up
a Roman coin or a telephone cable.
That Viking ship below the Moher Cliffs
is a film prop or another fold
in the wrinkled suit of time.
 
 
8
The river Fergus
runs like a wild clock
by the tumbledown house we rent
on a cold lake in County Clare.
Near the ruins of the mill
I catch an eel and, feeling a fool,
I let him go.
A local rod and tackle man
who comes and goes like a ghost in the dusk
says I could have kept him ‘for a pie,’
then hints at what I ought to know:
the trout are far too smart
to let themselves be caught
by a man so trapped in time.

. . . . . . . . . . . . .from Foraging (1986)

Poem for April, 2018

That Spring

The river was fast,
            icy vodka
            all through April.
 
It snowed, then rained --
            chicken-feathers, dust,
            confetti from another life.
 
The trees rose
            fervid as preachers,
            peopled with hymns.
 
Wind knocked some down,
            snapped others in half.
            The dead pine stood, and the wild cherries.
 
I made buffalo chili in the microwave
            and the light stood around
            longer every evening.
 
Sheep watched, distracted,
            as salesmen and bible thumpers
            sailed past in limousines.
 
Thunder in a tall green bottle,
            lightning in a copper bowl,
            scattered in shards and pieces.
 
Tracks were seen in the mud,
            possum and squirrel, heron and crow,
            shiny and new in the half-light.
 
And one violin performed by itself,
            no violinist, not even a bow,
            the solo of a solo of a solo.

......................from At the White Window (2000)

Poem for March, 2018

“Other Forms Were Near”: Five Words

            HONEYGUT (a word for tripe)

Below the graded green of tree, bush, weeds,
it’s silent – barn-cathedrals of quiet, but
no space: rooms all wall, jam-packed with roots (white sprays
hard tentacles), pebbles, sandgrains, humus,
tigerstriped tons of rock, pods of water and gas . .
 
When you wake in the morning, rumpled and stunned,
the crumbs around your eyes are there to tell you
where you were lying all night, what you were practicing.

              OAT

Yeats stands near his old-hat tower in the twilight;
everything talks to itself – the river over its rocks, the moorhens,
cricket and cowbell, wind in the chimney flue. What he’s gaping at:
the Great Pyramid, trembling like a bubble above the trees.
 
“Willie is booming and buzzing like a bumblebee,”
said Maud Gonne to a friend. “That means he is writing something.”
Who can he talk to when he’s neither here nor there? Mumbling,
gaping. As the specters billow and fade. Ripe mummy wheat.

 
             BABOON

Today a summer thundershower makes her think
of packs of sacred apes. Long hair, a kind of skidding run.
Isn’t the animal mirror best? Those hours in the zoo
watching the young gorilla’s hands: black leather work gloves.
 
The trees drip very strangely.
A robin runs across the lawn.
 
Bright eye.          Serpent mound.
The breathing next to your ear.

 
             HAZE

Old, you were dozing at a window and woke up.
A stranger stood in the yard, the moon behind him,
so that you couldn’t see his face. Then you recalled
 
watching a kingfisher from a canal boat: it was as if
that blue pulse tore straight through you. We’re best
 
when the world shines us through like that. At night
knee-deep in mist, the traveler pauses at a cottage,
straining to catch his face in the empty casement.

 
             INSECT

Cow skull, washtub. Sunday-supplement portrait. Gloomy greatness.
The poem’s place in the world was “never in dispute,”
they said. Any more than a blizzard. Or a candle.
 
When the dead walk, do they need to use their feet?
How gradual it seems, going to sleep each night,
instar after instar. I pace my study, looking for a book.
The snowstorm settles in its globe. The small bright flame
is nearly independent of its wick.

Poem for February, 2018

The House Was Quiet on a Winter Afternoon

Someone was reading in the back,
two travelers had gone somewhere,
maybe to Chicago,

a boy was out walking, muffled up,
alert on the frozen creek,
a sauce was simmering on the stove.

Birds outside at the feeder
threw themselves softly
from branch to branch.

Suddenly I did not want my life
to be any different.
I was where I needed to be.

The birds swirled in the dusk.
The boy came back from the creek.
The dead were holding us up

the way the ice held him,
helping us breathe the way
air helps snowflakes swirl and fall.

And the sadness felt just right,
like a still and moving wave
on which the sun shone brilliantly.

........................from At the White Window (2000)

Poem for January, 2018

Definitive

And let the snow
come through the door-cracks,
the wind blows, that’s his job.
 
And let Lena be forgotten,
a girl who drank
the spirits from the lamp.
 
Went into the il-
lustrations of Meyer’s Lexicon,
Brehm’s Wildlife.
 
Intestines, mountain ranges, beach carrion,
and let the snow
come through the door-cracks,
 
up to the bed, up to the spleen,
where the memory sits,
where Lena sits,
 
the leopard, the feverish gull,
arithmetic puzzles in yellow
wrappers, by subscription.
 
And let the wind blow
because that’s all he can do
and don’t begrudge Lena
 
one more swig from the lamp
and let the snow
come through the door-cracks.
 
                
                      Günter Eich, tr. David Young (c. 1977)

Poem for December, 2017

Notes on the Poems

      1   Was found in an orchard;
      is three or four thousand years old;
      was probably made with poor tools
      by the light of an oil lamp throwing
      shadows against the wall
      that would frighten us now.
 
      2   Would never have been possible without
      that famous fog of December 9th
      for out of that fog came Geraldine
      wearing a dress of chipmunk furze
      with a grackle perched on her wrist.
  
      3   Whole families were involved here
      and the death wish and the industrial
      revolution. You say the third line
      about the bathroom in the grocery
      was troublesome; I ask,
      should a poem make more sense than Omaha?
 
 
      4   It is right, little poem about
      wandering and misunderstanding
      that you keep coming back unwanted.
      Small avalanche,
      always missing your victims,
      come here ---
       I open my arms.

Poem for November, 2017

Late November:
The Wolves at the Cleveland Zoo

We walked in the cold at the zoo
                to see the wolves – six females
out of New Mexico, who range and run,
                gray smoke across a brown Ohio hillside,
while people watch them safely from behind
                a wall-high one-way window.
 
Their window side’s a mirror,
                and they approach it often, liking
wolves reflected back to them,
                especially the Omega wolf,
bottom of the order, needing maybe
                a touch more reassurance.
 
Though they can’t see us, says
                the curator of wolves, they hear us
and they smell us too, so that they see
                themselves and also sense
a something else, perhaps an enemy,
                possibly even prey.
 
You walk back through the cold,
                thoughtful and happy.
Home once again, you glance
                into your mirror, then approach it.
What is that sound, so faint?
                And what’s that complex odor?

Poem for October, 2017

Six Ghosts


The Suicide

You think I opened this door
on an impulse. I wish that were true.
But the door was there all my life.
Even when I looked away
I could feel its cold outline.
It knew. Knew I would touch the strange handle,
take one last breath, swing it ajar,
enter that room
empty of me.


The Hunter

The deer that had bedded down
in the second growth by the creek
started up and was gone
before my eyes and ears
could take it in.

Now, among mind-shaped trees,
I run ahead of the deer when I want to.


The Sailor

If I come back to the moment of my death,
the ship coasting across black water
its sails half-furled, glowing white
and the storm looming beyond –

If I come back it is not regret
but because I am part of some huge dance
that takes me there, breathless and laughing.


The Simpleton

Soap and the moon and my crown askew.


The Poet

All of the words cracked open
and I hatched out
to the world I used to watch
from the distance of my head:
thunder-scrubbed rainbows,
ploughed fields like rosy cocoa dust,
and that voice, echoing behind me.


The Reader

Now that my life is a cool book
I have read once, I can come back
to browse. Often I turn
to a chapter where nothing happened.
Even that is unbearably full,
and I stare at a single page for days,
its strange marks, its wild white silence.

......................from the collection Foraging (1986).

Poem for September, 2017

Section 9 of “The Light Show,” from “Poem in Three Parts,”
Earthshine, 1988.

Earthrise: from its rubbled moon
I’m watching the sun’s third planet.
It’s blue and white, with flecks of brown and green.
Vast weather systems swirl and mottle it.
Moist, breathing through its fantastic
membrane of atmosphere,
it crowds my heart with love.

The world’s suspended, Chekhov says,
on the tooth of a dragon. Even that tooth gleams.

I’ve come here to figure out how light
streams to the wheeling planet,
a solar blast, photons and protons,
and helps it live. Morowitz
and Lewis Thomas tell us
that energy from the sun
doesn’t just flow to earth
and radiate away: “It is
thermodynamically inevitable
that it must rearrange
matter into symmetry,
away from probability,
against entropy,
lifting it, so to speak,
into a constantly changing
condition of rearrangement
and molecular ornamentation.”

Which is how I got here, I suppose,
some rearranged matter
imagining and praising
“a chancy kind of order,”
always about to be chaos again,
“held taut
against probability
by the unremitting
surge of energy”
streaming out of the sun.

Behind, above, below me, stars:
countless suns with the same meaning!

Before me, leisurely as a peacock,
the turning earth.

Poem for August, 2017

Phenomenology for Dummies

....................for Charles Simic

The blue lips of the sheriff,
the news of winter-killed rose plants,
remind me to finger your dreams,
their trees and wistful vistas,
the tables piled with food,
bottles of wine crying drink me!
 
None of us has long, we hear,
and just so many poems left,
with more than enough dull moments
to sandwich in between.
Time to get up from the table,
take a stroll in the moonlight . . .
           
Soon enough, God knows,
everyone else will be asleep,
even the small-time demons,
while one of us will be sitting up,
next to a lamp and a moth,
keeping company with a book,
waiting for coffee and dawn.

Poem for July, 2017

Landscape with Disappearing Poet

....................Miroslav Holub, 1923-1998

Global silence
in this village.
One rides
one’s bike
through clumsy twilight,
watched from deep shadows
by whitetail deer
who have been here three million years,
one of Pangaea’s eye-blinks.

Silence
in the global village.
A poet disappears, dogs
bark, cells and stars
howl silently, are born,
killed, replaced. Cesium
clocks race on, viruses
waltz with receptor cells . . .

In Pittsburgh,
a man on Medicaid, with a cirrhotic liver,
having nearly drunk himself to death,
thinks it’s unfair.
Why can’t he have a new liver?

A very poetic situation, you would say.
But you aren’t here to say it.

Globed
silence.

Motorcycles
race down Highway 58
like the black thoughts of ruptured steelworkers,
dolphins and sharks
play games in the blue deeps
where bottles of champagne
in tranquil shipwrecks
age at one-fourth their normal rate.

A diver may grasp a bottle
and bring it up to the air, the here and now,
pop the cork, enjoy it.

Here, in this globally
dislocated village,
your American hideout,
a heron flaps slowly and in silence
along the local watercourse
a little too tired to fly,
a little too tired to land,
while golfers take mighty swings
launching balls they will never recover.

Angels seem to fall
steadily
in a rain around barns and pastures
distressed by the way the cows
slump to their knees on the kill-floor,
as birds pull worms in graveyards
where human brains, neatly arranged,
lie unplugged in their cases,
and nude mice, in their cages,
sniff the air, always hopeful.

When a poet dies, you wrote,
a lone black bird wakes up in the thicket
and sings for all it’s worth,
while a black rain trickles down
like sperm or something.

Well, yes, and sometimes
there is just silence,
shipwreck silence,
hot July silence
like sperm or something,
in which the eggplants ripen but don’t hatch,
the modest weeds like chicory
flower along the roads,
mud-wasps construct
futuristic
gray hotels, and Japanese beetles
gleam like bronze lozenges
among the shredded roses.

Silence in the global
village. Again,
at dusk,
an opossum
tiptoes across the empty highway,
a mother, her pouched
babies born
the size of bees,
as though the placenta
was just a passing fashion.

Her prehistoric face
carries a very faint grimace
that may or may not be a smile,
like that of a master
who has just
passed over the River Styx,
joking a little with the boatman,
and found eternity
a little bit
to his liking.

Poem for June, 2017

From "Broken Field Running" inIEarthshine, (1988):

3.

When Hare first heard about Death
he gnashed his teeth, went to his lodge,
and started screaming.

..........My aunts and uncles mustn’t die!

His thoughts went up to the cliffs and they started to crumble,
crawled across rocks and they shattered,
went down in the earth where everything stilled and stiffened,
glanced at the sky and birds crashed down, dead thoughts.

He went to his lodge, lay down,
and wrapped himself in his blanket.

..........Earth isn’t big enough.
..........It will be hard, all those dead,
..........and not enough earth to hold them!

And he lay there, wrapped in his blanket.

Poem for May, 2017

The Fragrance of Orchids

The body that aches with longing
is drunk at dusk and again at dawn

these wild mutual yearnings
return to us each spring

there in the rain goes a messenger
bearing a passionate letter

under the open window
stands one with a broken heart

up in the mountains a lover
rolls up a pearl screen, looking out

sadness comes back and comes back
as fragrant and lush as the grass

and we’re all walking home in the dark
from banquets and celebrations

or watching the quiet dust
that sifts down from our roofbeams.

...........................Yu Xuanji, woman poet of the late Tang Dynasty

..................from The Clouds Float North, translated by David Young and ..................Jiann I. Lin, Wesleyan U. Press, 1998.

Poem for April, 2017

from "The Light Show" III, 2:

Today the April light is fizzing.
The wind is blowing chunks of it around:
it oils pine needles, runs up tree trunks,
and spreads in clumps across the grass.
The grackles struggle darkly to resist it,
but it glosses their necks with purple and green
and slicks their beaks. I too
feel misery start to slip away – against my grain
I’m hoisted up into this giant light-machine
and swept away. My silver pen
skates on the yellow paper, my fingernails glow,
my eyes glisten with tears and pleasure.
A huge willow has fallen in my yard,
victim of wind. But today the other trees
are holding themselves up like song into a sky
that is blue with a radiance no one could imagine.

                          from Earthshine (1988)

Poem for March, 2017

Dinner Time

Where a glass of red wine
glows on the sideboard

and a few potatoes in a dish,
floury, flecked with parsley,

shine in the taciturn dusk,
as voices are heard in the kitchen

through the noise of dishes and pots
while an old man in suspenders

holding a half-read newspaper
rubs a spoon on his shirt

holds it at arm’s length
to catch his own reflection.

                          from At the White Window (2000)

Poem for Fabruary, 2017

The Bird Feeder

The snowy landscape’s mostly stunned and silent
except just here, where, busy as a mind,
a riot of arriving, leaving,
spinning, twitching, pecking, swirls around –
a splash of life, too intricate to graph.
 
Here in his red hood is the woodpecker,
folding his black and white-striped cloak behind him;
a waxwing coasts in for a perfect landing,
a mourning dove tries facing down a cardinal
over the fat black seed that lies between them.
 
Next comes the chickadee, riding his unseen wave,
the nuthatch, just as lucky upside down,
juncos and finches taking turns at thistle seed,
the bluejay screaming with sheer happiness . . .
A bush fills up with sparrows, then they vanish!
 
No wonder that I trudge around with sacks,
magic’s apprentice, chilly-fingered,
to stoke, re-stoke, this winter banquet;
it makes my mind wake up and speculate.
These seeds sustain me too. I soar.

                          Red Wheelbarrow

Poem for January, 2017

The Poem of the Cold

Admit you tried to make it pretty.  Start again. Talk about the huge nails going in, the serene blows of the hammer.  Flocks migrate at great cost, animals crawl painfully into burrows.  A starving man chews on a bird’s nest, cursing.  It may be true that wonderful things go on – a polished haw swinging on a tree in the oxlike wind, an old woman splitting wood next to a sand-colored barn – but you must avoid these.  For you are the cold’s thin voice, that thickens everything else.  As you sing, warm things ball up, shrivel, stiffen.  Hands become mittens, heads become hoods. Shadows lose their outlines, gates lock, waterfalls hang silent as their own bad portraits.  And gradually, as you shiver and wince, your poem will grind to its own slow close, like the works of a twenty-five pound clock, freezing beside the overturned dog sled, the scattered supplies, the man whose face froze around his tears and beard, the five dead huskies.

                          from Work Lights (1977)

Poem for December, 2016

December Fourth, 1974

Rainer Maria Rilke,
on this your ninety-ninth birthday
I make you the following presents:

a woodpecker's egg
roasted
in the flame of a small candle

an art nouveau jug
half full
from the wounds of your pretty
saints

the finger of a mummy
that will always point the way

a cloud of organ
sound a cloud
of orange and gold
butterflies
circling a pillar of salt

the nose of a pony that's
a trumpet a muscle a loaf

a poem by Tu Fu
that goes off like an old musket

the stunned
chain pickerel
I caught in a net this fall

oh the great big poppy of metaphor

the past and future for which you exchanged
my present your
present

I give it back, your present
that I keep finding and losing
red thread
angel's knuckle
smoke in the rafters. . . . . . crows

. . . . . . . . . . . .from The Names of a Hare in English (1979)

Poem for November, 2016

My Father at Ninety-Four

When you have gone away for good
I think I’ll hang a mirror by the door
hoping that you can visit, quiet man,
sometimes as a bird, or a dawn,
or a cloud around the moon.
 
When the mirror is open and empty
and I happen to pass it myself,
say, in a fine October twilight,
you will be there too, sometimes,
behind my eyes, calm and resigned.
 
When I can no longer find you, hear you,
I will go see the Great Plains again
and walk around the places
you took me to, a dance
of trees, farms, people, sky.
 
Stone City, Strawberry Point,
Spearfish Canyon, Estes Park,
Lake of the Isles, Yellowstone,
Nebraska sandhills, Wyoming sky,
towns almost as lost as Mesa Verde.
 
A son and a father, still shy about touch,
I’ll pretend I can put my hand in yours
from a greater distance, like two men
who stand on separate hills and wave
as daylight goes on to its rest.
 
                        From At the White Window (2000)

Poem for October, 2016

October Couplets

1
Again the cold: shot bolt, blue shackle,
oxalic acid, bleaching a rubber cuff,

a cow-eyed giantess, burning roots and brush,
the streak and smash of clouds, loud settling jays,

crows roosting closer – my older-by-one-year bones
have their own dull hum, a blues: it’s all plod,

but they want to go on, above timberline,
to boulders, florets, ozone, then go free

in the old mill that the wind and the frost run
all day all night under the gauze and gaze of stars.

2
Somewhere between sperm cell and clam shell
this space cruiser takes me places I’d rather

stay clear of: a planet all graveyard, mowed,
graveled and paved, bride-light and parson-shade,

or a milkweed, bitter, about to burst, or a dropped
acorn even a squirrel didn’t want, browning to black,

and I have to learn to relax with it all, to sing
“Where the bee sucks, there suck I,” though the lily

is sticky and choking, bees don’t suck, and the sting
is a greeting you never recover from.

3
“Steam of consciousness,” a student’s fluke,
makes me see a lake, linen-white at evening,

some amnesia-happy poet all curled up
sucking a rock at its black bottom;

oblivion tempts everyone, but I
would miss too much – whales and ticks,

the weather’s subtle bustle, blue crab clouds,
my kite rising, paper and sticks, a silver ember,

while the poem’s ghost waits by the empty band shell,
does a little tango, taps out its own last line.

4
But this fall rain, somehow both thread and button,
sewing itself to the malachite grass,

beading the clubs and brushes of the spruce –
all day I have sat as if gazing over water,

wind feathering the reservoir, stupid as a church,
and thought of summer: all those burst horizons,

mineral cities, rosy meat, clean seas and shaggy islands,
the wine cork popping in the grape arbor,

these things seem better and clearer and than gods just now,
raspberries hung like lamps among their brambles.

5
These leaves, these paper cutouts drifting my yard,
stars, fish, mitten, saddles: the badges and epaulets

of emptiness – last night in my dream
I was the killer, the guard who failed to stop him,

and the child who froze and was spared. Nothing lasts,
sang the crowd, and I answered, It sure does;

Is nothing sacred, roared the statesman – I do
believe it is, said I . . . I wake and shave,

still full of my dreamflood – oh skim milk sky,
oh brown star curling in my hand . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . .from Foraging (1986), and in memory of Franz,
. . . . . . . . . . . . .who especially liked the 2nd section

Poem for September, 2016

From “The Light Show,”
Poem in Three Parts, Earthshine (1988)

3.
Gaze of Apollo that kindled Rilke
even in a headless torso.
....................................Maybe because
it was piecemeal.
..................We need shadows,
smoked glass, spiritual parasols. Caravaggio
knew how contingent light is, how
it comes from the wrong side, lighting
lovers and murderers indifferently.
......................................................Well, we are
star-ash. Residue. Cooling sizzle
from an old mayhem of the sun.

Galactic epigones and afterlights.

And we love light and shade,
color and just a little dazzle.
If I called you a feather on the breath of God,
you’d want to know what color? Right!
Different if it were white, in thin noon breeze,
or black, zigzagging through dusk’s pines,
or brown, at dawn, upon an olive river . . .

Poem for August, 2016

Chopping Garlic

The bulb, an oriental palace
shrouded in gray and lavender paper,
splits open into a heap
of wedge-shaped packets housing
horns, fangs, monster toenails
all of a pungent ivory -- I
could string them into a necklace
but I smash them flat instead,
loving the crunch, brushing away
all the confetti – clouds
of odor bloom around me now
as I chop, this way and that,
with my half-moon blade
in the scooped wood
that will never completely lose
the fragrance that oils it, smears
my fingers, wants to be in
the pores of my skin forever . . .
trumpets and cymbals blare
as I dump the grainy mess
into the pan, oh, holy to the nose
are the incense and sizzle that summon
folks from all parts of the house
to ask about dinner, sniffing,
while up in one end of the sky
a crescent moon hangs crazily
a glowing clove,
a dangerous fragrance
filling the very corners
of some god's smiling mouth.


. . . . . . . . . . . . .from At The White Window (2000)

Requests to reprint this poem have been gratifying.

Poem for July, 2016

An early poem, c. 1962
Landscape in Three Lights

Under the round clouds
the flowers lean and yawn
stiff to the wind; shreds
of plumblossom stain
one corner of lawn. Down
further a rabbit ponders
the scene, his small, drawn
face alert for intruders.
 
They come. All afternoon
in the dispersing light
groups of people in fine
clothes wander and chat;
they gesture, laugh, croquet
balls click, ice chinks, but turn
where they will, the rising night
surrounds their paper lanterns.
 
It is the past, this dark.
The people disappear, their
murmuring grows berserk
in the wind. And what’s left here?
Somebody’s drunk ancestor
walking home in the moon
through the stubble corn, past care,
humming an old tune.

Poem for June, 2016 and November, 2008

A Ghost, to One Alive

There you sit, in the midst of your heart’s rich tick,
your breath coming and going,
a lax and happy piston;

your eyes blink, your tongue slicks your lips,
your brain hums, gobbling oxygen.
Oh hot, unconscious life . . .

I know I am hard to imagine –
a smoke bag, a spindle of mist, fume of an old fear-pot –
but you are just the opposite:

you ruin this sweet hush, two times too real,
and I find I have to drift back
from your clicks, wheezes and smells,

your mask of hope over a hopeless gape,
one eye on the wagging clock, muffled
amazement, bundle of hungers, oven stuffed with yourself!

If you knew a bit more you might envy me,
moon-scalded as I am,
voodoo-hooded and vague as cheesecloth,

a simulacrum of solid old you,
the last billow from a cold, closed furnace,
a dimple, at best, in existence,

the bird call without the bird.

. . . . . . . . . . . . .from Foraging (1986)

Poem for May, 2016

Poem at Seventy
(First two sections)

Rick went to Shanghai and was invited
..........to meet the “stomach talker,” a spirit named Lingge
..........in an otherwise unremarkable young woman
who spoke from her stomach, talking like a three-year old,
..........but had been “everywhere in the world”
and knew “most languages.”
 
He asked should he be fearful for his children.
..........She said Do not be worried, just concerned.
 
He asked her why there was a universe.
..........She said That was just Nature’s way.
 
He went away skeptical . . . and much intrigued.
 
And when he told me about it
..........I remembered 1968, in London,
when we went to hear a medium,
..........Robert Bly and Michael Benedikt and I,
 
an ordinary middle-aged lady
..........who stood at a podium, as if to read some poems
or give a talk on politics or quilting
..........and she got “messages” for people in the audience.
 
She saw the auras round our heads and she saw spirits
..........who she said signaled to us, holding up tokens --
watches, violins, wedding rings.
 
I went away impressed and wondering
..........but later thought the whole thing rather silly
a net of weaved belief, made by those present,
especially those who’d suffered loss and wished to know
..........their dead were peaceful and forgiving.
 
All of those tokens were clichés.
 
I asked my wife if I might take her grieving father there
..........and she said, Absolutely not!
 
 

 ..................*
 
 Everyone knows that something lies beyond us,
something that just escapes our senses,
there’s a shadow, there’s a luminescence
a music we can nearly hear, a nimbus . . .
 
Sounds come over sometimes, tingling,
glimpses are granted at the edge of sleep
a voice that seems to call our name, a deep
flash of sudden understanding . . .
 
The ordinary world lights up, a dance,
its thick distractions fall away,
and you’re continuous with everything.
 
You can be wild, knowing this, and sing;
you can be matter-of-fact and day-to-day.
Your mood makes little difference.

..................from Field of Light and Shadow (2010)

Poem for April, 2016

Swithin

Inside my dream the fair-haired ancient saint
who visited a group of living friends
gathered together in an English cottage
 
walked without stepping, read our thoughts,
spoke without need to use his mouth,
shone with a glow that didn’t hurt the eyes,
 
moved among those he blessed
smiling a riveting smile,
and felt, when he came to hug me,
 
not like another body but
not immaterial either, since
his fragrance was amazing.
 
When I was left alone in that dim room,
stroking a smoky cat and musing,
my mind charged up with wonder and relief,
 
it didn’t seem to me I’d been “converted”
but it did seem I’d had a glimpse of something
that would remember me when I forgot it.

..................from Black Lab (2006)

Poem for March, 2016

Wind, Rain, Light

..................The drooling roof of an old barn overhead,
the sup and chuckle of water.
                                             Nineteen sixty-four
and it's spring, or the first cold edge of it.
..................We’ve started a child, Chloe and I,
my seed taking hold in her
                                         as roots wake
birds stir and puzzle out their nests,
nights shining weirdly,
                                   days wind-scoured.
..................Clear water rills and wrinkles in the gutters,
snowmelt, purposeful as bees.
..................The sunlight
blisters it, dazzles it,
                                plays its own music
on the water's harp and the sky stands still
to let the new clouds pass,
                                        white-knuckled.
..................I have my car, a Studebaker,
glinting, already obsolete, I race
straight down old Highway 20,
 ......................................................yelling Avanti!,
light-drunk, wind-riddled, energy
rolling in waves
..................across the furrowed fields
while the black storms of our separate deaths
are forming: hers, now passed,
mine on the flat horizon,
very far off, even his, the child's,
as the fetus blooms,
..................as life takes shape,
blackness too soft to understand,
blackness we go back to,
breathing deep, still deeper,
                                        cupfuls of air,
our lungs like double buckets in a well,
filling ourselves with air-shine, a faint mist
hovering all around us,
                                        drizzle, filament, bead,
wipers ticking and streams of April rain
crossing the hood and roof,
spinning off,
..................another line of storms approaching,
sheets and curtains, miles of rain
crossing the plains,
..................   wavering rise and fall,
crackle of lightning,
..................   thundery dust and leaves
whirl up to meet the downpour.
Lake Erie churning and all of Ohio
flattened by rain,
..................my car nosing like a boat
through spumes and side-blasts.
..................This
life!
..................I put my hand out,
                                        reaching toward
my own face mirrored in the car,
tears that stream and mingle with the rain,
great hive of separate drops,
.........................................temple of spray and light,
no longer needing to know
....................................what anything means. 

..................from At the White Windows (2000)

Poem for February, 2016

Small Multiple Elegy

Tom goes by on his motorcycle.
 
I’d like to wave, but he’s already
disappeared over the hill.
Tiny now . . . tiny Tom.
 
’Bye, Tom.
 
It’s summer here, birds singing as
the dawn expands from pearl gray
to lemon yellow.
 
Dead poets show up at dawn.
 
Here’s Miroslav, watching a spider
build its web.
 
Here’s Kenneth Koch, who died last
week, sitting quietly, hands folded.
 
Here’s Shahid, fixing his ghazals,
obsessed with Kashmir, keeping
suffering at arm’s length.
 
Tom goes by on his motorcycle.

..................from Black Lab (2006)

Poem for January, 2016

Hymn to the eye from
Names of a Hare in English (1979):

eye,
 
strange that your name should be an ideogram,
two peepers with a crooked beak between;
an on beyond the thing itself
a jelly bleb, bubble of stare,
loll-in-a-socket, goggle-in-a-purse;
the little leak that floods the cave:
 
I came to the rim of the crater
to see where it lay asleep
under its flaps and dark spike fence
(work never stops in the observatory),
then it jumped open and I ran home,
back to the name, hearing behind me:
 
I am blue. My name is Helen.
Haply I squeeze a tear
and it rolls away with a wet spoor.
In the dark hole where all of you go 
you will not need me. See?

Poem for December, 2015

The Snow Bird

Not a bird made of snow, but the snow itself --
snow is a bird.
 
Most of the feathers are unbelievably small,
lit from within.
 
Crisscrossing branches all through the woods
and the bird
 
falling among them, flying among them,
calling its no-call.
 
A squirrel scribbles the page of the yard.
The bird hides, white.
 
Falling by day, by night, needing no rest,
making the world its wing --
 
making the clouds its perch, the sweep and stitch,
the glare-hush . . .

                     from At the White Window (2000)

Poem for November, 2015

Reading Yannis Ritso in November

A basket of apples, a bunch of carrots,
a poppy recognized as summer’s wristwatch . . .
Sunlight and suffering, the old Greek way --
the new one too – did not desert him;
 
in prison, out of it, he drew and mused and wrote,
cherished small things that never went away,
and dreamed a revolution too, that never came,
the lit mirage of a just and ordered city.
 
Here in Ohio snow will be falling again,
and I’m back to a night in 1957,
walking out of a dorm in Minnesota
 
and seeing Northern Lights across the heavens,
banners and shimmering folds of green and rose,
indifferent to our wondering, upturned faces.

                     from "Occational Sonnets" in Field of Light and Shadow

Poem for October, 2015

My Mother at Eighty-Eight

Shrunken like an old sweet apple
out of a half-forgotten orchard,
her mind as hollow as an apple seed,
she greets me now, her middle child,
without the least idea of who I am.
 
Her eyes glitter. Nothing behind them.
 
Or has she journeyed to a prairie
where all our codes and grids have been abandoned,
no houses, no towns, no roads -- clear sky,
a few clouds riding aimlessly across it,
and a bird or two, meadowlarks probably,
tossing around in its depths? 

                      from At the White Window (2000)

Poem for September, 2015

              LEDA

When you’re only a second-string
nymph, and you want to be up there with
the Immortals, you’ll do anything
to get into a myth.
 
This guy with wings on his hat
and feet – I think he was gay –
came round for a little chat
and I said, “Okay,
 
what do I  do?” He whispers in
my  ear, very mysterious.
I didn’t believe him! “With a swan??”
He was serious.

                      An early poem, never collected.
                      Appeared in Satire Newsletter.

Poem for August, 2015

“It’s a Whole World, the Body. A Whole World!”

                       ---  Swami Satchidananda
 
1
No, it’s a tenement.
You enter from the top,
feeling your way down the bad stairs,
sniffing.
 
Someone is practicing
on a rubber piano
in the elbow.
 
Gangsters in the stomach,
splitting their loot.
 
These peeling walls, these puddles,
babies screaming in the back,
shoulder arguing with neck.
 
There’s a big party in the groin;
you aren’t invited.
 
2
Or it’s open country.
Steady rivers, muscular pastures,
deep weeds, foothills.
 
Nobody lives off
the fat of the land.
 
Huge clouds come up without warning:
brainstorms.
 
 
3
Say it’s an ocean.
Ladies wade there, shuddering.
Surgeons pass in their yachts.
 
Hiccup: a message
in a bottle.
 
The pervert descends
in his submarine.
 
 
4
Swami, the body’s a butcher shop,
a family lost in a wax museum,
moonless planet, ancient civilization,
a swami, a world,
seldom whole.

                       from Boxcars (1973) and in memory of James Tate

Poem for July, 2015

Three Walks

1. Near “Appleby,” Axminster, Devon. June, 1982
A path, garden, a country lane,
with a very old lady and her daughter,
the whole evening holding tremulous
as though it might never end.
A codger watering his broccoli
talks up the art of gardening as
we gaze at his cabbages and gooseberries.
By his garden wall and along the lane
foxglove is speechlessly in bloom,
herb Robert, hogweed, eglantine,
everything, even the grass and cuckoo-spittle,
touched with the slow welling-up of life.
When we come back I hear again
some thrush in the deep shade
making a music as intricate
as what we were walking through.
 
 
2. Near Arcidosso, Tuscany. July 1979
Maybe I like this city for being
nearly unknown, off in the mountains.
Over and over the cuckoo calls from the chestnuts
this sleepy midday. Red and lemon posters
for a circus, ORFEI, plaster every  wall,
and I can imagine a humdrum Orpheus
ambling the narrow street to the bakery,
pausing to stare
at the round fountain where a stone mask
blows a thin rope of water
into a basin, a rope without ends.
He would climb to the old castle,
baking in sunshine, where
the air is alive with bees
that build in the crumbling masonry.
What would he make of it all? Would he stand,
his eyes blurring with tears,
looking back through the smoke of time
at the women and men, come and gone,
who have seen how the earth is lovely
and seen how its meanings desert them?
 
 
3. Near Lorain and Oberlin, Ohio. July 1982
Backward and forward in time, as if
by way of England and Italy, I’ve come
to stand in the K-mart parking lot
while Cassiopeia hangs askew
beyond the cornfields, come to hear doves
calling all morning in the rain
like very tired cuckoos.
Tomorrow, the Fourth of July, I’ll go
mushroom-gathering in the cemetery
to the rumble of summer thunder
among the distant dead, Huron Weed, Amanda Peabody,
and the newer dead I knew, George Lanyi, Jean Tufts,
and if it’s not so time-caressed
still I will pause there, startled,
as though I stood on my own heart
in nature’s haunted house,
as again, in the long-drawn evening,
with the fireflies signaling –
commas, hyphens, exclamation marks –
and the skyrockets in the distance –
foxgloves, fountains, bees,
constellations and mushrooms
hung for a second or two 
on the dim sky above the trees.

                       from Foraging (1986) and in memory of David Love

Poem for June, 2015

One Who Came Back

. . . . . . . . . . . .for Franz Wright

I can’t be sure
why we should want you among us
 
you with your bruised clothes
your fingers thickened by pity
 
terror’s night watchman, mopping blood
where the books lie stitched with quiet
 
who stood in the grass near the graves
striking the match of darkness
 
but I know we seem to need you
the way we do bread or warmth
 
so I’m out here in the moonlight
pounding nails in your footprints

as if that could make you stay.

. . . . . . . . ..from The Names of a Hare in English (1979)

Poem for May, 2015

The Poem Against the Horizon

In a dim room above the freightyards, next to an old brass bed, an angel is taking off his wings. He winces a little as he eases the straps that run down into his chest: the beat of the wings is the beat of the heart.
 
Out of harness, the heart rolls over now. Panting like a wrestler. Such love, such soaring! Spokane and back. So good to come down, home to this room with the stained lace curtains and the sound of switch engines. So good to remove the wings, the love, the yoke the blood must wear as it paces, oxlike, the circle of its day . . .

He sleeps on his side in the overalls he was too tired to take off. Outside the window, rain runs and drips from the eaves. Overhead, the wind and the black sky belong to someone else.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . ..from Work Lights (1977)

                for Rick Bursky

Poem for April, 2015

Walking Home on an Early Spring Evening

Every microcosm needs its crow,
something to hang around and comment,
scavenge,
alight on highest branches.
 
Who hasn’t seen the gnats,
the pollen grains that coat the windshield ---
who hasn’t heard the tree frogs?
 
In the long march that takes us all our life,
in and out of sleep, sun up, sun gone,
our aging back and forth, smiling and puzzled,
there come these times: you stop and look,
 
and fix on something unremarkable,
a parking lot or just a patch of sumac,
but it will flare and resonate
 
and you’ll feel part of it for once,
you’ll be a goldfinch hanging on a feeder,
you’ll be a river system all in silver
etched on a frosty driveway, you’ll
 
say ‘Folks, I think I made it this time,
I think this is my song.’ The crow lifts up,
its feathers shine and whisper,
 
its round black eye surveys indifferently
the world we’ve made
and then the one we haven't.

..................from Black Lab (2006)

Poem for March, 2015

March 10, 2001

Three crisscrossed daffodils
faint lamps in the rubble
 
where without any warning
I’m shattered by your absence
 
wondering will I always
blunder into this emotion
 
so large and mute it has no name
-- not grief   longing   pain
 
for those are only its suburbs
its slightly distracting cousins --
 
summoned just now by these
frilled blossoms
 
butter yellow horns
on lemon yellow stars
 
indifferent    innocent
charging in place
 
advance guard of a season 
when I will join you.

..................from Black Lab (2006)

Poem for February, 2015

The Hour of Blue Snow

Dusk on these late winter days
is a matter of daylight giving a little shrug,
then vanishing.
 
But when it does, the blue snow moment comes.
 
That’s when, for instance, two or three deer
materialize from nowhere, stroll through the backyard,
and vanish in the woods. As when the ancient gods
came down to wander their enchanted world.
 
Then I remember to breathe again,
and the blue snow shines inside me. 

..................from Black Lab (2006)

Poem for January, 2015

Lullaby for the Elderly

Under the hum and whir of night, under the covers, deep in the bed, beyond all the calling of doves, past the great flares of love and pain, the daily bread and grind, it’s warm as a pot, soft as a breast. It’s the deep woods, the place where you come to a clearing, find the still pool, and slip gently into it -- to bathe,  to dive, to drown.
 
Your mother is there, under the leaves, smelling of milk, and your father is hiding among the trees. A giant hand tousles your hair, and the mouse is there with its dangerous eyes, the bear with his shimmering fur, the rivers that thunder off ledges and spill into gorges as mist.
 
When you wake, refreshed, murmur a blessing for those who have never returned.  Say a word to the corn and the wheat, to the deer and squirrels and whistling toads, who brought you right up to the edge of the woods and let you go in on your own. 

..................from At the White Window (2000)

Poem for December, 2014

While this poem is exactly fifty years old,
the mystery of divinity has not changed for me!

On Neglecting to Baptize a Child

Now that our son is come,
The house turns mythic:
Milk drips from the eaves,
Leaves grow in the attic.

At dusk great kings drift in
To serenade us.
The plumbing drums; like priests
The radiators hiss.

Christmas is near; we three
Enact in parody,
Like figures in a crèche,
Scenes of nativity.

It’s not the same, thank God,
It’s simpler mystery.
What do we know, all told,
Of immortality?

Have we deceived our friends
Having no christening?
We feel, root, branch, and bud,
Our lives turn evergreen.

..................1964

Poem from October, 2007 and October, 2014

October’s Stem and Head-Piece

I’ve carved this pumpkin with a moonslice grin
and star-shaped eyeholes. I want him to go rolling
among the reaches of the universe, hung glitter,

and let the spirits spinning on themselves
among the ice, the burning dust, the gulfs,
the inky gasses, streaky bursts of starlight,

know how this blue sky and this honey locust
are just what the great gods would have booked
if they could order up a world of form and color.

I want him hinting of the wells of being here
quenching the greatest thirsts, those wells we taint
when we forget we need to sing the death-chant

that wraps me now, as I flush seeds and pulp and strings
into the rippling creek, then hurl the cerebellum
into the brush where nobody will find it.

All night the sallow face smiles at clouds,
licking the cream, winking at the wolves,
as pinprick after pinprick fills the sky.

. . . . . . . . . . . . .from At the White Window (2000)

Poem for September, 2014

This poem just appeared in Miramar 2. My thanks!