Be like a tree and let the dead leaves drop. —Rumi
The maple, on this wild
October day, lists each leaf
as it leaves. Each one,
perfectly formed in spring
like a green, newborn baby,
is now an old man,
a wrinkled woman.
To say Fall is to tell truth.
Their house has fewer possessions
than when my wife and I helped
them move in three years ago.
Now we are helping them ready
their home to not be theirs.
I clean doors with baby wipes,
My wife and friends touch spots with paint.
The doors whitened, I stretch
on familiar wooden floor,
wipe down dusty baseboards.
World Series Game 7 is on,
a welcome distraction from grief,
a bat cracking, the breaking of my heart.
I am lifting my gaze
with the lichen, catching
the first golden breeze
off the sun in the sharp spruce-tops.
I am resting it
next to the pearls of last night’s rain,
among fog-white filaments:
willow’s new creation.
I have not addressed my prayer
or my reservations
to any of these. Not exactly. Nor
have they spoken back to me.
Exactly. But I am the one who is trying
not to be too definite.
God, meanwhile,
along with this whole
community of creation
laughs, and plays.
Orange Shirt Day is celebrated across Canada on September 30
to remember children who died while attending residential schools
and to honor survivors like Phyllis Webstad, who wore an orange
shirt on her first day at an Indian Residential School. The shirt
For at least the twenty-five years I’ve coasted
the dry, arterial freeways of Michigan,
the same billboard has hovered over I-196.
In Christmas-red letters it reads: Believe
on the Lord Jesus and you shall be saved.
Every Friday I drink three beers and fling
myself upon my pillow, soft as the homely
belly of the Buddha. I arrange my debts
and assets like tempered glass nesting bowls
clouded with soap scum. Whoever
leases that sign year after year
would be disappointed to haul up in his net,
It wasn’t nice,
No, wasn’t nice,
To be called in the Garden by God.
He called us once,
He called us twice.
Was no answer a thing He thought odd?
He must have known,
We were His own,
He presumably knew what we did.
Or was He stunned
By what we’d done?
We refusedly shut up and hid.
At thirteen months Ben can say Ma Ma, Da Da
and Fa Fa, which he watches his father create
in a wood stove each day to heat their home.
Tonight Ben rocks beside the iron box chanting
Fa Fa as softly as flames draw light from paper,
then drops his head and charges to the kitchen
to point toward the range’s burners: Fa Fa.
When I tip a foiled pot of tulips
to his face, he finds no name for what lifts
his spirit: Aah Aah, his cheek, fingertips,
Tainan, Taiwan, 1990
Lingering by the iron pump—
its handle a lazy S—
and the shards strewn about
among clover-leafed weeds,
the girl gestured her once-haunts
to the brown-haired foreign boy.
Pointed to yellowed houses
slipped slightly from old moorings,
lightly slapped the red
brick wall, the chipped
tiles of pomegranates
and glazed peaches. “Before,”
she said, “I lived here.”
Mute and sweating,
he stepped back, stepped back.
What I throw out to those I love
Returns unreached to me, to me.
Bow stubborn knees to God above?
I do if prayer turns round to me.
Slow whirling in an empty sky,
Whoosh whooshing almost soundlessly,
Sole focus of my ear and eye,
It all comes back to me, to me.
Yet selfless love I’ve read about
And once or twice I’ve even known.
A miracle, as it turns out:
Him swapped out for my blood and bone.