For Ruth

Though we missed our daughters up in Michigan, it was lovely to spend eleven days alone with my wife Ruth Diamond-Guerin. This is by way of love and appreciation.

For Ruth

Is there just one universe?

There the stars and here the cafe.

Hidden lights illuminate the tables.

The various darknesses immerse

Men and stars in dissolving clay.

Are both god and science fables?

The universes are infinite,

They say, and time does not exist.

But here we are and there the stars.

The air is full of perfume and wit,

And a wine too ancient to resist.

All else is beyond, late and far.

Let's nibble galaxies and swallow suns.

I'll count my hours with you by ones.

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.

Bleeding Hearts (Julia Guerin), Sonnet #605

We shouldn’t ever pluck them —

They endure so few days.

Their rows bow each stem

Just how much love weighs.

My wife’s come from a garden

Her mother tended for years.

She would beg your pardon

To say: “Not like blood, but tears.”

I watched my daughter draw

This picture for Mother’s Day,

Obeying her own inner law

To paint what only she can say:

Three mothers’ hearts in one

Sweet flowering of passion.

Try

The man walks along the lake,

His hair and clothes wild, unkempt.

He’s lost all that he could take

From life and love, and the attempt

To understand the meaning of I.

The waves wash up to his naked feet,

As if to urge him once more to try.

Where the horizon and the skies meet,

He sees himself, a constellation,

So far away, fleet and improbable,

Drunkenly spinning concatenations

Of entropy and incessant babble.

New, Sonnet #604

Now is perpetually new:

My hands in dishwater soap,

Or two hawks locked in mews

In air that inhales, exhales hope —

Nothing is always out of scale,

Nor is every metaphor stale.

There’s no trick to all of this,

No existential treatise.

A moment is a moment’s kiss

We perpetually miss.

The dishes are clean and dried,

No matter how hard we tried

To ignore them in their dirty sink:

Little that we knew we now think.

Light Verse

A man stepped onto a star,

Asked, “Can I have a blink?”

“You’ve had too much to think,”

Said the star, “Go to Mars.”

But the planet, dull and red

Had burnt out, gone to bed.

“All I want is a wink of light,”

Said the man to the sun,

Who replied, “Oh, thou person,

I don’t think you’re very bright.”

[Don’t look to me for a moral —

My insight’s fading, auroral.]

Then, Sonnet #603

Then we were what we are not,

Our only vestiges of characters

Who long ago ignored the plot.

Within the high branches of factors,

We’ve continued climbing down,

Never touching a limb we've known,

Except what swiped at our backs.

The undone things one never lacks.

Some like to remember, some forget

Intentionally: “Those I never met.”

If and then! We cannot choose which;

If we don’t unblindingly recall,

Then it just becomes a mental itch —

Then after the present’s fall.

Photograph by the author.