Stevens

Before the last ending of autumn,

A startled cry from inside

Seemed like a mind in its sound.

I knew only what I had heard,

A baby’s cry, at midnight or after,

Above the late November wind.

The moon was rising at two,

Once a crumpled mask above dead leaves . . .

It could not be inside.

Not from the chiaroscuro

Of sleep’s faded paper sky . . .

The moon wasn’t coming inside.

That startled cry—it was

A tone whose song preceded tuning.

It was nothing like the old moon,

Surrounded by its echoic tone

Being right here. It was what

I’ve always known to be real.

The Brook

The brook ran through high mountain pasture

From failing glacier to pool to pond to lake,

Between banks limned with moss and aster

Rooted in cascades of shattered igneous flake.

I straddled the water running slow over stones,

My boots precariously gripping boulders

The water’s rilling shaped into hipbones.

Further up hunched matching shoulders.

I found a head and rolled it in, midstream.

The shallow, muttering water, unperturbed,

Flowed around and on like a vanished dream.

Provoked, I left not a rock undisturbed

And rolled them in -- the addled stream burst

Banks and drowned the mountain pasture’s thirst.

The Pileated Woodpecker

Fly-fishing,

I stand mid-stream and thigh deep,

line trailing.

Fleet shadow on the water . . .

up,

the bird

drops on wind, lands in a birch. I’ve

never seen

one before. No thought of fish now.

For full ten

minutes I gape.

He stays.

I

step on land

careful to keep the tree he’s in

in focus.

He hops behind the trunk as

I circle.

A full circle

and no bird.

Three dull taps.

Three more. He’s in

another tree

behind me.

He falls, drops across the river,

twice beats wing,

lights on a dead beach.

I am soon

waist deep ten feet beneath him.

He must fear the threat from land,

not water.

Now I am his and see

all

of him clear:

the blood crest and zebra throat,

the black sheen

of his back, the stiff feathers

he grasps bark

with,

crampon-like,

dangling

underneath.

Infinitely patient he is

listening.

Infinitely insistent,

he hammers

in threes and sevens and eights,

each

beat

stressed.

Something not

one man in all the world could do.

He chops from two sides just like a

lumberjack.

Bark chips and wood dust

rain down

on my head.

A hand-shaped

patch he clears of bark then drills

a thumb hole,

then seems to give up (or has tongued

the gummy larvae)

and moves on.

Imagine

that sticky membrane sheathed in iron.

All this is

repeated and repeated and

nothing quells

his hunger

or blunts his intent.

He has mind:

curious, cruel, incisive,

reasoning—

he solves problems, remembers,

is cunning

(if not wicked), devious, his

consciousness

a thing that has come before and

after me.

I do not hear his wild call

even once.

Leaving first,

I take no pleasure

but rightness.

The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors (The Large Glass), Duchamp

Red lines pressed upon the large glass—

a clear field where small acts take place.

Her gaze lost in three tissues of cloud,

her waist in stays closing off the air,

she’s mad and will not greet her suitors.

Beyond the street—dust collecting in homes’

new windows, grit loosening from shingles.

She watches children teach birds to kneel.

Her priest instructs: In prayer you whistle

because god grows old and only birds

can make a sound to pierce his tired ear.

Oaken wainscoting, parquet floors, the house

beneath a coat of white paint; white curtains

adorn the flat shoulders of the window seat,

where she sat as a child, her back to the street,

and memorized the rattle’s conversation.

The pad of flesh between her lips dances:

Tell us, Old Town, the color of your buildings,

like sawdust of the ancient windbreak blighted,

shown no pity by the time, taken at the fullness

of its usefulness, and what will bring it back?

Show us trees descending staircases.

Explain the wind. Don’t show us what it blows.

One man will know the whiteness of her body.

It will cost money to fill her with his fluid.

Shirking his vigil duty, a drunk male

slips from his tin coat and runs away—

his scream knocks a cloud out of the sky.

The other eight, glazed by window sweat,

spin in place, fool with spoons, sip

from hot cups the taste of her nipples.

Beneath the floor hard earth holds back

the odor that aspires to ghosthood and hopes

one day to mount the basement steps.

Note: The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass),

by Marcel Duchamp, is installed at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Trinity

Lightning is the God of Again.

He strikes no place twice from above

As long as the clouds don’t bear rain

And heat remains frictionless love.

Air, God of Now, fills each tulip

Like a sun not subject to shade,

With love makes the balloon pop

And sees the dead carcass decayed.

The God of And is in the dust

Blown from soil, blown from flower,

Clinging in the storm clouds where lust

Of Now for Again breeds the hour.

The Argument from Design

The religious impulse, it seems to me, is more about seeking than finding. There’s no greater composer devoted to this search than Gustav Mahler. The most memorable concert I ever attended was roughly 15 years ago. At that time, my mother was dying of cancer and Alzheimer’s. The Berlin Phiharmonic and Claudio Abbado were performing Mahler’s 9^th Symphony, a work full of searching, sadness, desperation, resolution, and redemption. At the end of the performance, Abbado did something I’ve never seen a conductor do before, nor since. After the last note, he kept his arms up, pausing everything, the room entirely quiet, for the longest time. He waited and waited, and waited. No one made a sound. Then it hit me. It was as though he was saying, “Consider what you have just heard, the sorrow, the wonder, and the searching in this music, and do not despair.” It was a terrifying and joyful moment, and when he finally put his arms down, followed by the loudest applause I’ve ever heard.

Not long after that, I wrote this poem about searching.

The Argument from Design

There is only one tree in the park.

Not this day only, but every day,

I find that tree when the day grows dark,

Never before dark, when the gray

Leaves are like a whispered amen

To a prayer I wasn’t there to say.

Therefore, I’m cautious and slow when

I start to climb (I believe the tree

Is not unknown to other men);

I test each limb before I leave the

One beneath, without assurance

Any but the lowest will receive me.

Then my doubt subsides where I chance

Upon a tangled branch, ripped free

The time I almost lost my balance.

Now I can move quickly up the tree,

Into its clotted heart, where the dark

Yields, to my callused fingers only,

The life of the one tree in the park.

An Observation

It is hard to look at things,

harder to say what you see.

Rattle each grain of sand

in its grave of desert?

Why begin unless you intend

to see things to the end?

And do not rely on the words

you overheard in a dream,

not knowing what they mean,

how they sound, those half-shadowed

chess pieces maneuvering

in and out of thought, unthought.

Language goes hard as time

at the first understanding.

Everything goes inside it,

which is an unopened box . . .

vague outline of a blue box

against a black background.

Then your voice’s children

as they escape to the street,

as they wade into the crowd . . .

the wind sucks them through a bone.

A plume of exhalation

withers on the zero air.

We know only one thing,

as a novel knows one story,

like a closed book reading

its own discrete emotions

pressed to paper word by

word, comma by comma.

It is not only duration

allows our mouths approaching

by halves to sometimes kiss.

A word is startled by the eye,

and something is discrete,

if still unknown, no longer.