Category: Poems

Let neither of us speak.
Language is a dirty trick
on days when what I need will not be named.

I try, and you, the loyal waiter
keen to please, you try,
but I don’t know the words for all my want.

I ask, I think, for the flaming dessert,
something sweet and volatile.
You courteously set yourself on fire.

That’s not what I want.
I’ll stop asking altogether,
let my foot propel me in a heavy, gentle arc.

The body will act without being told.
Our lungs engage the sweetness of the air,
the fall sky and its more than blue that doesn’t need a name.

Stay with me
and we will float till dark,
then on into the quiet of the night.

 

It wasn’t snow
anymore but glitter
raining down from
some bright sieve
shaken over our construction
paper landscape
and turning us
into grade-school art
with macaroni birds
and too much glue,
which is maybe
why we stuck so well
side by side
in what wasn’t
snow but shiny
simple peace of mind
and calm that comes
from being fingerless
in warm mittens
without having to grasp
at finer details,
all the smaller work.
No tests of dexterity,
just boy walks with girl
and bumping
playful shoulders
in what wasn’t
for the moment
cold or slick,
what wasn’t hard,
what couldn’t have been
snow.

 

Others report
———————————————————-fields of zinnias, trains chugging
while he stands at the depot
waving to the sleeping as they shudder past.

He is stationed nightly
in the brash and empty
———————————————————-horizon spooling out like bolts of silk
pool of shallow light.

This leaves him
with trespasser’s guilt,
———————————————————-charcoal-outlined bones of leaves
citizenship revoked, exiled

to a minor role in one of Kafka’s stories.
Maybe he’s the man who folds himself in half,
———————————————————-strong wind snapping at a gemlike kite
maybe one who loves the river, never makes the jump.

Of the remaining six, two dream of flying
once a month or more.
“I’ve never felt so free,” they say.
———————————————————-“I cried when I awoke.”

 

Where we store folding chairs
and empty baskets, he bangs
on padlocked doors and shouts
about the angle of the light,
emptiness of baskets,
emptiness of chairs.

“That’s great!” we yell, “Keep writing!”
We sneak in while he sleeps
to steal his paper.

Some days he slides haiku beneath the door,
pleading on holiday linens:

aaaaaaaaa podium mic
aaaaaaaaand a pitcher of water
aaaaaaaawith a single glass

“Profound!” we holler,
stuff syllables in our mouths,
chew them up, swallow.

We can’t let him out because
he’ll notice everything first.
He’ll sprint ahead of us around the room
stealing it forever,

our own narrow words
flapping behind, trailing
red ribbons of the runners-up.

It will always be the anthem
of his nation, his bright flag,
his victory lap to our slow panting.

So we make copies of the key
and wear them on blue thread
around our necks, medals of a sort,
simple, fair head start.

 

     for Maggie who is learning

Saint James says not to be as one
who looks into a mirror
and then forgets his face,

but he was never seventeen, a girl in love
who for the first time finds herself reflected
as a word worth speaking.

She will forget a thousand times
just to have the one who spoke the word
repeat it like a pulse.

She will feel a debt:
he has settled an account,
some space within her calculated

as if she were a buried pearl.
She will feel he’s bought this worthless land
to dig and dig for her,

one hundred craters in the earth,
a crazy man by moonlight
with faith in treasure no one else believes.

Later, she will see he did not invent her.
At best, he was a skilled translator
of a language she had yet to learn she was.

In the beginning was the Word.
In the beginning was the girl
who could not say herself.

In the end, she will stand, bone white,
and smash the rock that held the secret name
because it is written, now,
in a place more permanent than stone.

Don’t go, she says. It’s dark.
The cold is hardly worth the stars.

There’s nothing there you haven’t seen
before. The unjust sky,

your finite breath, its plank
across the well’s broad mouth –

no words in
or out. Stay with me,

and feel our shoulders sink,
weight of useless muscle like a song

we need not lift again.
See the cup on the nightstand? Empty,

poured out, dry and tired. Sleep.
But something restless stirs against decay.

My heart defies the empty cup
and bellows in my wrists and throat:

Rejoice! This throbbing pulse,
this store of life within the bone:

this is your inheritance: a sky replete
with stars, their fireshine a map

spent in what it gives
of hope, direction in the night,

and you no longer frail, you warrior,
you prince, awake

in the sharp thrill of pain
that fires the blood

and so turns you to star, to guiding
life and light. Get up. Go out. There’s more than this to see.

I tend petunias on my deck,
pluck spent blooms,
stare inside each star-shaped eye;

drink a glass of water for my health,
wash hands and face
chanting thank you softly like a charm;

straighten up these books
with characters who speak like you,
corner of the happiest page

folded gently down.

I want you to have seen wide fields,
the fields your father farmed,
want you to say heaven is

so like our favorite places on the earth
that death is no departure.
The fields you didn’t see send numbness

down my arms. You say it was a blank –
black space, no explanation owed or guaranteed.
We sit at winter’s stoplight in a car.

You confess how being back,
if back is what this is, is hard – safe
without some proof of growth,

mission, battlefield. Cocooned inside
the car, steel heart stopped
at an intersection, is prayer discipline

or honesty? Do I cry out?
Last week, a sorrel threw my friend.
Do I make that breaking sound

or train myself to higher will, subsumed
by other glory?
It makes me sad some days,

more in love with myself, less
willing to believe this life is mine.
And you: still certain

of the wheat, the harvest stubble,
empty barn where blank and holy need
will amble back for rest.

I close my eyes, make peace,
surrender to the lightless home
before the loved arrive.

I sit next to the chokecherry tree
fat with little white flowers in past weeks
holding a book without opening it.

I do this so the world won’t smell like you.

It’s all new since you left – rain, cut grass,
little white flowers – that should make it better.
Nothing close like winter wool.

I’ve washed everything, rearranged drawers,
thrown away the socks with holes,
torn up letters you didn’t even write.
I’m going way back, purging from before.
You wouldn’t know the people I’m forgetting.

That’s the reason for the book,
so I can know things I haven’t told you.
All the words like little flowers
leave a scent you wouldn’t recognize
and I’ll have secrets again,
things I’ve felt alone.

I don’t open it.
One stack idles,
bad photos I can’t discard,
people caught between expressions,
unprepared and looking lost.
I feel tender toward their faces,
loose white flowers.

Another evening goes,
closed book resting in my hands.

 

for Claudia at 5 hours old

There were two kinds of mornings
the day you were born.
We had the other.

We whispered about you in bedrooms
and then we talked in kitchens.
We did laundry, folded sheets
thinking about your hands,
how they would be so small.

We paired sock with sock
and then we saw your sister who knew
this was the day she was suddenly big,
bigger than when she went to sleep

because of you,
how you would see her,
all that you would need.

We all thought about what you’d need,
so we arranged flowers, rode in boats,
cleaned sinks, bought apples and washed them.

We talked about your tiny feet
and then your damp-dark hair.

Your morning was water and light,
warm voices and, for the first time, taste.

Ours was final preparation, final prayer,
other things in the world that wanted you,
waited on you,

saw you, at last,
home.