What After (for Ruth)

In a motionless thicket, a single leaf
twists, as if two fingers roll its stem,
then stops. It twists again and drops.

In a tree, broken branches held aloft
by stubborn bark sway on a pendulum
wider than the solid branches swing.

Most things blaze before they die.
Stars nova and sunlight is an
incandescent exhalation.

What after? What, after my last
shiver through, do I want there to be?
Leaf, branch, star, sun, and you.

Past is Past

I

Sequestered, placid as Lake Louise,
a mirror propped between cataracts

of ageless and degraded rock,
we’ve forgotten the ecstatic plunge

and caress of clouds, for the slow roil
unseen, mimicked by old rainfall.

My grandfather’s moon gazes on me
at all the wrong times, never seeing

the Aurora Borealis
or the darkness between each star,

only his own tired, smiling face,
which long since ceased to be a face.


II

We are the April lawns returning,
divided by the mower-barked roots

of the only tree we know. Enveloped,
sheets of green between loam and air,

pierced by worm and bird, and decay,
yielding the hue of our enthusiasm,

we grow. Given the choice, we might
welcome rootlessness for the freedom

of air. Only the ground is given.
Our life, at both its root and blade,

diminishes to a hair’s breadth,
and there is transubstantiated.


III

All that is left of us is faces
painted on the underside of rocks

lining the walkway. We hear footfalls,
spend what little breath clings to us

trying to blow, flip on our backs.
Between the glass and the silvering,

refraction is pure and unmarried
to purpose. Images are trapped,

but free to look in either direction.
Two hands place the mirror in the grass

and then, gently, on it rest the rock.
All that is left of us is faces.

On a Dreamed Report of Death

We are ready for those who die in wires,
tolled at midnight with little bells.

A dead face is an injected wax
or unbelieved victim of murder.

What does she look like after twenty years,
asleep beneath those moonscape blankets?

Yes, I knew her. Long ago. She is dead?
Only dead again? And only now?

A remarked absence. Emotion vacancy.
Oh, a vague perhaps, perhaps. Regret

for the loss of intelligent laughter.
But the color of our first kiss is faded.

I know the color of my blood is blue.
See it through the crepe of my wrist.

I can’t imagine hers now gone red,
a blue jay turned to cardinal overnight,

then to crow, scribbled with white words,
living on again in description.

Death, an appendage of memory,
a wireworm on the body of a fish

within our grasp, releases its host
for us, to test our flesh with constriction.

We wrench ourselves to be free of it,
and when we are, think only of our pain.

All recollection is a form of lie.
Here, in this city block of wild sand,

the mounds in the front yard are old friends;
only the man I am may tend them.

They sleep beneath the scratching of my rake,
dance into gardens only in my sleep.

I wish her long life beneath the sun.
Perhaps she thinks of me now and then.

WAVES

The night will not give in to dreams.
The blood surges, remembering the beach,
where the wind drove the waves in teams.

What is it that the waves teach --
a vanishing point as ephemeral
as any the sky and the waters reach.

Excess of motion, rising to hurl
against the barricades of air,
falls . . . back into itself unfurls.

Inexorable—that sense in a nightmare
that is terror—the waves think
wave on wave to a deafening tintamarre.

There is no conclusion. Ideas sink
beneath the idea that follows,
visions turn to vision with a blink.

Is that all interpretation allows?
My thoughts ran to other things
as I stood lock-kneed in the shallows.

Whitecaps, feathered like seagull’s wings,
beat themselves in a luscious foam,
and etched the beach with sectioned rings.

And like the white space in a poem,
the troughs between each wave held
true, as line upon line washed home.

Would understanding forces that meld
curve to nested curve, that swell
the inhaling tide, that seamlessly weld

a form to its proportion, tell
me if the surf is a deity’s gift
and not a repeated curse from Hell?

Then the balance—a feather adrift
upon the breeze, cartwheeling down the beach;
how the fretful gusts would lift

it always just beyond the reach
of the sandy slip. I watch it seem
fearless, playful, dodging each
wavelet . . . and so begin to dream.

Equals Infinity

The infinity pool is unbounded
of course and of course

expression itself in the double
description of its single point,

the fisherman’s wet net flung
to catch irregularities of the sea—

our Aegean has never been emptier!
The gold light bends the gold wave

on the tear beading on the lash
where a pencil has left its gash.

We cannot look too closely
at anything (that can’t look back),

without understanding to death
matter not worth knowing or love

or faded images resolved into
a moiré of inconsequence.

We confront the one artist,
questioning his portraiture—

all these faces deftly drawn
by an artist drawing himself.

EPHEMERA

How many evenings in ten years;
most spent—reading aloud, listening—
trying to be conscious of their joy?

Today one child is still only ten.
The other is only, still only five.
Time disappears into their growing.

Sometimes you think that even
to be conscious is not enough—
then you despair, like a castaway,

fingers cupped on the sea’s edge,
afraid to sip when it is the whole sea
you are dying, dying to drink.

Close and Soon

Cutting an uneven swath, he steers
the tractor round his father’s lawn.
As the scraggly grass disappears,
he wonders where the time has gone.

The clouds roll like ingots
of gray iron on a rack, roll
off the sky. The industrial
moan from across the river
accompanies their production.
Once the snow here lay pocked
with cooling ash, a white coke
we rolled into dejected snowmen.
The fat carp were too hungry
to eat food. I would soak bread
in WD 40, pinch it on a hook.
And even now the speedboats go
too fast, as though the sunken
piers and jetties of old concrete
were demolished by the headlines
blaring tragic stupidity. The wake
quickly comes to shore and rolls
back out to cross and pattern
that from the opposing shore,
while ravening carp suck and spit.

The mower rattles, drones, whines,
churning the long-neglected grass,
leaving mulch in jagged lines
he scatters with a second pass.

He built three piers: two
on piles sunk into the ooze,
straight, elegant, stable,
and after the spring’s ice
in two-foot thick floes broke,
one of board and steel drums
tipped and bobbed, drawn
each fall onto the riverbank,
lock-chained to a willow tree.
But here he’d sit, grim,
implacable, shaving his acre
and two-thirds, while his son
pulled ten-pounders out,
yipping he couldn’t hear, like I
can’t the foundry throb but know
the sound’s there. I don’t know.
Turtle head he helped, once I’d
waved him down, draw snapping out
swearing, hatcheting the baggy neck
blood spattering his khaki pants.

The biggest part of the back yard
starts as a perfect, shrinking square.
Though he turns each turn hard,
each turn goes wider, mowing air.

Then the things he didn’t know.
Pipe puffed until it dizzied
me—sitting on a stump, staring
at the lights dreaming on glass.
Dancing to chants, speaking in
fragments, chemicals cutting
my blood, at the film that lays
on the eyes like a named color,
we laughed until we thought
laughter would wake the moon,
the heat, the willows, the river,
like barging in on our sleeping
parents would wake their dreams.
And the sticky, aching, itchy
pair shielded by the willow’s
weeps, clothed in humid darkness,
kissing her where I’d never
thought kiss, yipping and moaning,
that tiny furry tightening fist
releasing me from my loneliness.

To square the square, he turns away
to look back, after each side.
It takes him much longer this way,
but his Dad would be better satisfied.

Last night, the mosquitoes took
their meal at her tender skin.
She slapped at them and made words
of the light in the ripples,
gave the Big Dipper seven names.
The dark grew pure, but didn’t scare
her. She could hardly see even
me. She wanted a word for each
sound, each shadow, hungry
for names she thought I gave
to mulberry, nighthawk, cicada.
I made a song about the trees
dropping tears into the river.
Are leaves tree tears? Yes,
and the wind is tree laughter.
That is how you give yourself
to things, close and soon.
Where did I learn that? Cut
grass till it’s done. Welts all
over her body. Not one on me.

Finished, he disengages the blades
and returns the tractor to its shed.
His hands’ buzzing slowly fades.
Off, the engine sings in his head.