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.
A half-dressed man once pointed his gun
At me from an upper floor window
In the street: “Hey, kid, want some fun!”
He laughed. For a moment I didn’t know
Who I was — not until he disappeared.
Nothing had happened, something feared,
Because the child’s world I knew
Had never been so wrenched askew.
Even so, I ran home, my lungs bursting,
Shouting with joy — no, then cursing,
Crying, tears stinging, feeling shame
For which I’ve never found a name.
( )
( )
I took a photo seven times —
A thick grove of dark spindly trees
Backed by a bright December sun —
And a small turquoise dot shines
In each — the camera lens sees
Images where I think are none.
I continued my walk by a pond,
Looking for mink and waterfowl.
Hawks circled each other beyond,
Their screeches in the wind a howl.
From deep hoof prints I knew a deer
Had trod this path, now nowhere near.
I stared at the sun — a blinked tear
Painted the trees with a blue smear.
There is so little that is right here,
I might suspect there’s nothing more.
Everything grows within the sphere
Of my eye — ocean crashing shore.
What’s far is near, what’s then is now,
Eating a pear is taking a vow.
Can I leave it at that, the I
Looking through the window at trees,
And nail thunderclouds to the sky
With a hundred thousand me’s?
Ego was never so rewarded
Choosing to lose what it’s hoarded.
Some say there is nothing beyond,
Ignoring our interstitial bond.
One hundred and one years ago
He diagnosed our vertigo.
His scalpel cut beneath the skin
And removed original sin.
He held it in his palsied hands —
The nothing he left on Margate Sands.
It’s only gotten worse since then —
The commandments are ten times ten.
Dust is fear and the unreal real.
Now it’s not what you think, but feel.
A cacophony of voices
Warns us to forget all choices.
As night falls a whimpered prayer
Leaves the nervous chanting sayer.
The faintest chitter of leaves in the Fall,
The slant auroras beneath the branches,
The blue-gray clouds that are not clouds at all,
But cloudless sky the fading light blanches,
The warmth and the chill I feel on my cheeks
As sunned and unsunned breezes alternate,
Each gust not finding what the other seeks,
And not one beast reaching out to a mate.
Today I walk this ordered avenue
Until the moon tops the furthest poplar.
It's so bright I can't see a single star,
A Milky Way I cannot know, but knew.
I reach home as the shadows slip away.
Only the moon's been moved enough to stay.
