in the grocery store tonight
the persnickety cashier
smiled at me as though I were
a so-loved friend she knew
she would not see again
the sun was going down
the sky was pink and full of wind
O world I want to take you
in my arms: the trees the colors
the seas full of pufferfish
every warm and frightened
animal body that relies on the
rhythm two lungs make to go on
being what it is
In a time of no wind, in a spell of stasis after stars.
In the almost morning morning, in the dawn before
the solar dawning, the pause before the prelude,
the hush that wombs the day, just stay, stay put
before the roving eye can see, before the ear can hear
the no-news news. Be here, exactly where you are,
and where you aren’t, in the unsown garden,
in the sheer unknowing, in the windless blowing,
in the fenceless land, in the I before the I began.
Abide, don’t hide, but neither spin the wheel of fate.
Fifties split-level, clapboards olive green
When we moved in that June. Big trees green, too.
(We’d come from a gaunt, treeless subdivision.)
Green, too, the nearby river and a fence
Of painted wood, a four-foot outfield fence
Prettying up the nearby baseball diamond.
How happy these things seemed to me at ten,
Even though I’d heard poured out inside our car—
Father, small sister, mother up in front,
And in the back, two younger brothers, me—
My parents’ ample fears about the price.
It’s the memory of your harmonies and the grim house
lifting in your ebullience that I’m holding against
this deadly fugue, the flight from everything and nothing
we the world have known.
I would be singing somewhere in the house
and you’d come streaming into the song,
your strong alto current bearing my higher notes
into joy that was, I see now, a resistance
Quiet.
Even the locusts have vanished,
taking their strange invisible castanets with them.
Where are the birds? Too silent, for June.
The longest day was yesterday.
Darkness descends from now on,
sidling in like some hairy beast
with an eye that glitters in the twilight.
The first rush of flowers, potted
at the back door: silver mound a backdrop
for red geraniums, and lavender spikes
raised in blessing.
Daily rain for months. The green
glows neon. The fox a russet flash.
Like unsigned poems, are everywhere in everything, the center
of a sentence unsighed the chains of a hoop still rattling long after
the ball has passed through on its perfect arc. We half-see
in the place we pass through—a haunting that is only a space
where something else has lived, still resonant. Whitman said
to look for him beneath our feet in the dust rising. To believe
that we are made of Whitman dust, in dusk, stars flickering. We
carry the ache of our own loss like someone searching for the keys
River Seine, 2006
So, you decide this is worth
writing about, or painting—
the shapes of the branches on
the trees, how the afternoon sun
gleams on the mottled trunks,
how their reflections echo in the river.
You cannot change the image;
it has been there for centuries.
All you can do is move your own
body, shifting the angle here and there,
back and forth, so that you
see the thing differently,
until you find a satisfaction.
We didn’t remember that shade
of green, almost translucent, rousing
the distant hills for another try.
Or the pale trillium and hepatica
emerging from underneath
dry leaves, plastic bags, and beer cans,
woods keeping their tender secrets.
We didn’t remember the smell of rain
on the thawing ground, the softness
of its fall, or the sound of rushing
water once the ice had gone, laughter
heard from an open window.
There is something to be said for solitary.
Those initial appearances, you may recall,
were not made before acclaiming throngs
with sounding brasses, immaculate ranks
of lilies, golden banners, alleluias
and the like, but to one or two, three
at the most, battered, broken souls
seeking solace for their grief and fear.