I tell myself softly, this is how love begins—
the air alive with something inconceivable,
seeds of every imaginable possibility
floating across the wet grasses, under
the thin arms of ferns. It drifts like snow
or old ash, settling on the dust of the roadways
as you and I descend into thickets, flanked
by the fragrance of honeysuckle and white
primrose.
I recall how my grandmother imagined
these wanderers were living beings,
some tiny phylum yet to be classified as life.
She would say they reminded her of maidens
decked in white dresses, waltzing through air.
Even after I showed her the pods from which
they sprang, blossoming like tiny spiders,
she refused to believe.
Now, standing beside you in the crowded
autumn haze, I watch them flock, emerge from
brittle stalks, bursting upon the world as
young lovers do—trysting in the tall grasses,
resting fingers lightly in tousled hair.
Listen, and you can hear them whisper
in the rushes, gazing out at us, wondering—
what lives are these?
Browsing category: Nature
Walking the Dog on the Night before he is to be Fixed
As far as I can tell, old chum, neuter
is neither here nor there, but in-between,
a state that has a certain charm, like pewter,
prized for durability, if not for sheen.
Tomorrow night you’ll stroll in wary fashion
after the sleep, the knife, the careful scars
that promise to put an end to wayward passion
not to mention long-imagined wars
for territorial rights, a lady’s paw.
Tomorrow the thermostat is set on cold
in calculated stern hormonal law.
What I know of this is what I’m told:
All veterans must come before the vet
on calendars either canine or lunar.
All lose that first fine frenzy to beget
whether it be later, friend, or sooner.
I toast us both then, Franz, in our decrease,
though there’s no way for you to know that I’m
also tugging manfully at the leash,
waiting doggedly for the nick of time.
Coming Home at Twilight in Late Summer
We turned into the drive,
and gravel flew up from the tires
like sparks from a fire. So much
to be done—the unpacking, the mail
and papers…the grass needed mowing….
We climbed stiffly out of the car.
The shut-off engine ticked as it cooled.
And then we noticed the pear tree,
the limbs so heavy with fruit
they nearly touched the ground.
We went out to the meadow; our steps
made black holes in the grass;
and we each took a pear,
and ate, and were grateful.
Honeysuckle
It sprang up wild along the chain link fence—thick,
with glorious white
and yellow summer blooms, and green tips that we
pinched and pulled for one
perfect drop of gold honey. But Dad hated
it—hated its lack
of rows and containment, its disorder. Each
year, he dug, bulldozed,
and set fire to those determined vines. But each
year, they just grew back
stronger. Maybe that's why I felt the urge to
plant it that one day
in May, when cancer stepped onto my front porch
and rang the doorbell,
loose matches spilling out of its ugly fists.
Compendium of Lost Objects
Not the butterfly wing, the semiprecious stones,
the shard of mirror,
not the cabinet of curiosities built with secret drawers
to reveal and conceal its contents,
but the batture, the rope swing, the rusted barge
sunk at the water’s edge
or the park’s Live Oaks you walked through
with the forbidden man
or the pink-shuttered house on the streetcar line
where you were married
or the green shock of land off I-10, road leading
you away from home.
Not any of this
but a cot at the Superdome sunk in a dumpster
and lace valances from a Lakeview kitchen where water
rose six feet high inside
and a refrigerator wrapped in duct tape lying
in the dirt of a once-yard
and a Blue Roof and a house marked 0 and a
kitchen clock stopped at the time the hurricane hit.
Because, look, none of this fits
in a dark wood cabinet for safekeeping.
This is an installation
for dismantling
—never seen again.
Land’s End
This air,
you say, feels as if it hasn't touched land
for a thousand miles,
as surf sound washes through scrub
and eucalyptus,
whether ocean or wind in the trees
or both: the park’s big windmill
turning overhead
while joggers circle the ball field
only a few yards off
this path secreted in growth and mist,
the feel of a long narrow theater set
about it here on the park’s western edge
just in from the highway
then the moody swells of the Pacific.
The way the chill goes out of us
and the sweat comes up
as we drive back into the heat
and how I need to take you
to all the special places, or show
you where the fog rolls down
and breaks apart in these hills or where
that gorgeous little piano bridge
comes halfway through the song,
because when what has become dormant,
meager, or hardened
passes through the electric
of you, the fugitive scattered pieces
are called back to their nature—
light pouring through muslin
in a strange, bare room.
Renaming the Planets
Backs on pier’s cool planks, fingers
intertwined, my girlfriend and I
gaze into forever as comets
tear open the sky, bright streaks
winking like distant fireflies.
Beyond them, a dwarf planet sulks
in its orbit. Einstein said nothing
could outrun physics’ laws;
even time must bend to fit its rules.
Yet scientists once declared Earth
center of our universe;
earlier still, that it was flat.
Evolution of what is certain
proves nothing is absolute,
not even a Rockwell scene
of young lovers beside
a lake, waiting for the future
to arrive from heaven.
Sunday Morning Early
My daughter and I paddle red kayaks
across the lake. Pulling hard,
we slip easily through the water.
Far from either shore, it hits me
that my daughter is a young woman
and suddenly everything is a metaphor
for how short a time we are granted:
the red boats on the blue-black water,
the russet and gold of late summer’s grasses,
the empty sky. We stop and listen to the stillness.
I say, “It’s Sunday, and here we are
in the church of the out of doors,”
then wish I’d kept quiet. That’s the trick in life—
learning to leave well enough alone.
Our boats drift to where the chirring
of grasshoppers reaches us from the rocky hills.
A clap of thunder. I want to say something truer
than I love you. I want my daughter to know that,
through her, I live a life that was closed to me.
I paddle up, lean out, and touch her hand.
I start to speak then stop.
June 15th, 8pm
The evening comes slowly over us,
over the cardinal and the wren still
feeding, over the swallows suddenly
swooping to snatch up mosquitoes
over the marsh where the green
sedge lately has a tawny tinge
over two yearlings bending long
necks to nibble hillock bushes
finally separate from their doe
mother. A late hawk is circling
against the sky streaked lavender.
The breeze has quieted, vanished
into leaves that still stir a bit
like a cat turning round before
sleep. Distantly a car passes
and is gone. Night gradually
unrolls from the east where
the ocean slides up and down
the sand leaving seaweed tassels:
a perfect world for moments.
Solstice
How again today our patron star
whose ancient vista is the long view
turns its wide brightness now and here:
Below, we loll outdoors, sing & make fire.
We build no henge
but after our swim, linger
by the pond. Dapples flicker
pine trunks by the water.
Buzz & hum & wing & song combine.
Light builds a monument to its passing.
Frogs content themselves in bullish chirps,
hoopskirt blossoms
on thimbleberries fall, peeper toads
hop, lazy—
Apex. The throaty world sings ripen.
Our grove slips past the sun’s long kiss.
We dress.
We head home in other starlight.
Our earthly time is sweetening from this.
Strawberrying
My hands are murder-red. Many a plump head
drops on the heap in the basket. Or, ripe
to bursting, they might be hearts, matching
the blackbird’s wing-fleck. Gripped to a reed
he shrieks his ko-ka-ree in the next field.
He’s left his peck in some juicy cheeks, when
at first blush and mostly white, they showed
streaks of sweetness to the marauder.
We’re picking near the shore, the morning
sunny, a slight wind moving rough-veined leaves
our hands rumple among. Fingers find by feel
the ready fruit in clusters. Here and there,
their squishy wounds. . . . Flesh was perfect
yesterday. . . . June was for gorging. . . .
sweet hearts young and firm before decay.
“Take only the biggest, and not too ripe,”
a mother calls to her girl and boy, barefoot
in the furrows. “Don’t step on any. Don’t
change rows. Don’t eat too many.” Mesmerized
by the largesse, the children squat and pull
and pick handfuls of rich scarlets, half
for the baskets, half for avid mouths.
Soon, whole faces are stained.
A crop this thick begs for plunder. Ripeness
wants to be ravished, as udders of cows when hard,
the blue-veined bags distended, ache to be stripped.
Hunkered in mud between the rows, sun burning
the backs of our necks, we grope for, and rip loose
soft nippled heads. If they bleed—too soft—
let them stay. Let them rot in the heat.
When, hidden away in a damp hollow under moldy
leaves, I come upon a clump of heart-shapes
once red, now spiderspit-gray, intact but empty,
still attached to their dead stems—
families smothered as at Pompeii—I rise
and stretch. I eat one more big ripe lopped
head. Red-handed, I leave the field.
Knoxville, Tennessee
I always like summer
best
you can eat fresh corn
from daddy’s garden
and okra
and greens
and cabbage
and lots of
barbecue
and buttermilk
and homemade ice-cream
at the church picnic
and listen to
gospel music
outside
at the church
homecoming
and go to the mountains with
your grandmother
and go barefooted
and be warm
all the time
not only when you go to bed
and sleep
Summer Apples
I planted an apple tree in memory
of my mother, who is not gone,
but whose memory has become
so transparent that she remembers
slicing apples with her grandmother
(yellow apples; blue bowl) better than
the fruit that I hand her today. Still,
she polishes the surface with her thumb,
holds it to the light and says with no
hesitation, Oh, Yellow Transparent . . .
they're so fragile, you can almost see
to the core. She no longer remembers how
to roll the crust, sweeten the sauce, but
her desire is clear—it is pie that she wants.
And so, I slice as close as I dare to the core—
to that little cathedral to memory—where
the seeds remember everything they need
to know to become yellow and transparent.
Yellow Lab Outside the Coffee Shop
The yellow lab outside the coffee shop
today cannot sit still; but instead
radiates the ever-expectant energy
of a thousand hummingbirds,
tail sweeping back and forth
across the gray, littered sidewalk.
Sits without touching the ground,
knowing that any moment
the one who matters most will emerge,
slip his worn leash from the bench
and the day will suddenly fall into
place: every sound, sight, and aroma
discovered anew, the sun thrown
everywhere at once, with a cool lake
of shadow following, following,
as if it had somewhere to go.
The Arrival of the Past
You wake wanting the dream
you left behind in sleep,
water washing through everything,
clearing away sediment
of years, uncovering the lost
and forgotten. You hear the sun
breaking on cold grass,
on eaves, on stone steps
outside. You see light
igniting sparks of dust
in the air. You feel for the first
time in years the world
electrified with morning.
You know something has changed
in the night, something you thought
gone from the world has come back:
shooting stars in the pasture,
sleeping beneath a field
of daisies, wisteria climbing
over fences, houses, trees.
This is a place that smells
like childhood and old age.
It is a limb you swung from,
a field you go back to.
It is a part of whatever you do.
Bad News, Good News
I was at a camp in the country,
you were home in the city,
and bad news had come to you.
You texted me as I sat
with others around a campfire.
It had been a test you and I
hadn’t taken seriously,
hadn’t worried about.
You texted the bad news word
cancer. I read it in that circle
around the fire. There was
singing and laughter to my right and left
and there was that word on the screen.
I tried to text back but,
as often happened in that county,
my reply would not send, so I went to higher ground.
I stood on a hill above the river and sent you
the most beautiful words I could manage,
put them together, each following each. Under
Ursa Major, Polaris, Cassiopeia, a space station flashing,
I said what had been said
many times, important times, foolish times:
those words soft-bodied humans say when the news is bad.
The I love you we wrap around our
need and hurl at the cosmos: Take this, you heartless
nothing and everything, take this.
I chose words to fling into the dark toward you
while the gray-robed coyote came out of hiding
and the badger wandered the unlit hill
and the lark rested herself in tall grasses;
I sent the most necessary syllables
we have, after all this time the ones we want to hear:
I said Home, I said Love, I said Tomorrow.
Moonrise, Aurora, Nebraska
No Ansel Adams
but the snapshots we captured
through the open car window
on our eight megapixel cell phones
on the side of the road off an exit ramp
as truck taillights streaked eastbound
opposite the earth’s rotation
in startling calm that evening
a mere dot-glow above dun fields
Look, life is like this, filled
with moments of meaning
paid attention to or not
but we tried we lingered
and sure enough it is here
looming in memory-mind
the fat orange ball above horizon
inching up into blank navy air
the full moon in early spring
we drove toward in silence
In Spring
I’m out with the wheelbarrow mixing mulch.
A mockingbird trills in the pine.
Then, from higher, a buzz, and through patches of blue
as the fog burns off, a small plane pulls a banner,
red letters I can’t read—
but I do see, over the fence,
a man in a sky-blue shirt walking his dog to the beach.
He says he missed it, will keep an eye out.
Four barrows of mulch around the blueberry bushes,
I’m pulling off gloves, and he’s back, beaming.
“It says, I LOVE YOU, MARTHA.
Are you Martha?”
The Gatekeeper’s Children
This is the house of the very rich.
You can tell because it’s taken all
The colors and left only the spaces
Between colors where the absence
Of rage and hunger survives. If you could
Get close you could touch the embers
Of red, the tiny beaks of yellow,
That jab back, the sacred blue that mimics
The color of heaven. Behind the house
The children digging in the flower beds
Have been out there since dawn waiting
To be called in for hot chocolate or tea
Or the remnants of meals. No one can see
Them, even though children are meant
To be seen, and these are good kids
Who go on working in silence.
They’re called the gatekeeper’s children,
Though there is no gate nor—of course—
Any gatekeeper, but if there were
These would be his, the seven of them,
Heads bowed, knifing the earth. Is that rain,
Snow, or what smearing their vision?
Remember, in the beginning they agreed
To accept a sky that answered nothing,
They agreed to lower their eyes, to accept
The gifts the hard ground hoarded.
Even though they were only children
They agreed to draw no more breath
Than fire requires and yet never to burn.
One Among a Thousand Possible Versions
The backyard lilacs were my mother’s favorite.
You could swoon from their scent in the spring.
You could lie on your back all afternoon
looking up through their purple calligraphy
to emerge hours later with a damp shirt back,
light-headed and dizzy.
I remember her thin, tensile arm,
the flashing cuts of her engagement ring
when she gripped our skinny wrists.
My fragile, ferocious mother
denied ever raising a hand against us,
even when my father caught her
washing my sister’s mouth out with soap.
Her denials were epic and dazzling,
cathedral-like in their complexity, and unending.
She taped a poster to our front door:
“War Is Not Good for Children and Other Living Things”
and wore her MIA bracelet for decades,
long after the U.S. had left Vietnam.
Her missing soldier was never found.
“Her missing soldier was never found.”
As good an epitaph as any.
The war in our home went on and on.
She took me to Washington with her,
and we marched, in protest, at Nixon’s inaugural.
Black shrouds covered our faces,
and around our necks we hung signs which read
“Hanoi” and “Saigon.”
A poem like this should have flowers in it,
or at least the skreel of bagpipes.
Because she wore so many veils I go naked
and tell and tell, too much of everything.
She would have fought and died for us
if only we’d lived under siege.
We lived under siege.
Still, she made sure I went to France,
and took me to plays where she cried in the dark.
The closest I ever felt to her
was the one time, parked in the car,
when I blurted out, “I always felt
you weren’t really my mother,”
and she shocked me by saying, “I know. I’ve never felt
it either.” Afterwards, of course, she denied it.
But even a few words of truth create their own star.
And that’s what she is for me now,
a fugitive beacon, often obscured
by smog or cloud cover,
but blazing relentlessly, bright and far.