February 2012
11 posts
THIS MUCH I DO REMEMBER
It was after dinner.
You were talking to me across the table
about something or other,
a greyhound you had seen that day
or a song you liked,
and I was looking past you
over your bare shoulder
at the three oranges lying
on the kitchen counter
next to the small electric bean grinder,
which was also orange,
and the orange and white cruets for vinegar and oil.
All of which converged...
FEBRUARY
It is all kind of lovely that I know what I attend here now the maturity of snow has settled around forming a sort of time pushing that other over either horizon and all is mine in any colors to be chosen and everything is cold and nothing is totally frozen soon enough the primary rough erosion of what white fat it will occur stiff yellows O beautiful beautifully austere be gotten down...
Musee des Beaux Arts ("Museum of Fine Arts")
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of...
YOU CAN'T HAVE IT ALL
But you can have the fig tree and its fat leaves like clown hands
gloved with green. You can have the touch of a single eleven-year-old finger on your cheek, waking you at one a.m. to say the hamster is back.
You can have the purr of the cat and the soulful look
of the black dog, the look that says, If I could I would bite
every sorrow until it fled, and when it is August,
you can have it...
WORDS
Strip to the waist and have a seat. The doctor
will be in soon. He smiles and the nurse smiles.
He sits on the table, bumping his knees together,
scratching around is navel, counting the tiles.
We never talk, she says, and so you talk
and everything you speak of falls apart.
This is how we come to understand
what they mean by chambers of the heart.
Some words are said to start a...
THE ARCHIPELAGO OF KISSES
We live in a modern society. Husbands and wives don’t
grow on trees, like in the old days. So where
does one find love? When you’re sixteen it’s easy,
like being unleashed with a credit card
in a department store of kisses. There’s the first kiss.
The sloppy kiss. The peck.
The sympathy kiss. The backseat smooch. The we
shouldn’t be doing this kiss. The but your lips
taste so good kiss. The bury...
DEAR ONE ABSENT THIS LONG WHILE
It has been so wet stones glaze in moss; everything blooms coldly. I expect you. I thought one night it was you at the base of the drive, you at the foot of the stairs, you in a shiver of light, but each time leaves in wind revealed themselves, the retreating shadow of a fox, daybreak. We expect you, cat and I, bluebirds and I, the stove. In May we dreamed of wreaths burning on bonfires over which...
OTHER LIVES AND DIMENSIONS AND FINALLY A LOVE POEM
My left hand will live longer than my right. The rivers
of my palms tell me so.
Never argue with rivers. Never expect your lives to finish
at the same time. I think
praying, I think clapping is how hands mourn. I think
staying up and waiting
for paintings to sigh is science. In another dimension this
is exactly what’s happening,
it’s what they write grants about: the chromodynamics
of mournful...
Leaf Huts and Snow Houses
These poems don’t amount to much, just some words thrown together at random. And still to me there’s something good in making them, it’s as if I have in them for a little while a house. I think of playhouses made of branches we built when we were children: to crawl into them, sit listening to the rain, in a wild place alone, feel the drops of rain on your nose ...
AMUSING OUR DAUGHTERS
after Po Chü-i, for Robert Creeley
We don’t lack people here on the Northern coast, But they are people one meets, not people one cares for. So I bundle my daughters into the car And with my brother poets, go to visit you, brother. Here come your guests! A swarm of strangers and children; But the strangers write verses, the children are daughters like yours. We bed down on mattresses, cots,...
MEMORY IS NOT ENOUGH
Memory is not enough…
I do not recollect. What I am
is alive in me because of you. I do not reinvent you
at sadly cooled-off places you have left behind.
Even your absence is filled
with your warmth and is more real
than your not-existing. Longing often meanders
into vagueness. Why should I throw myself away
when something in you may be
touching me, very lightly, like moonlight...
January 2012
8 posts
ASH ODE
When I saw you ahead I ran two blocks
shouting your name then realizing it wasn’t
you but some alarmed pretender, I went on
running, shouting now into the sky,
continuing your fame and luster. Since I’ve
been incinerated, I’ve oft returned to this thought,
that all things loved are pursued and never caught,
even as you slept beside me you were flying off.
At least what’s never had can’t...
All the World's a Stage
All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players; They have their exits and their entrances, And one man in his time plays many parts, His acts being seven ages. At first, the infant, Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms. Then the whining schoolboy, with his satchel And shining morning face, creeping like snail Unwillingly to school. And then the lover, Sighing like...
LIGHTING YOUR BIRTHDAY CAKE
Of course we didn’t come this far without leaving a trail, but it’s only footprints on a beach; one wash through our memories, and it’s gone. Strange, so much passion, commitment, doomed to be drifted over like Troy and Babylon, pitiful echoes now of all those eager heartbeats. You’ve always cared so much, about us, sure, but really everything— hungry kids,...
THE RELIGION OF BIRDS
Everywhere people are mad for miracles. They search their coffee cups, dunk babies in holy water, pay 25 bucks to learn to destroy silverware with only their minds. Nothing is an accident, a friend assures me, everything happens for a reason: a divine CEO neatly matches personal ads, zaps deadly tumors into tension headaches, serves as the spokesperson for cellulite cream. Even as a materialist, I...
Have you anything to say in your defense?
Well, on the day I was born, God was sick. They all know that I’m alive, that I’m vicious; and they don’t know the December that follows from that January. Well, on the day I was born, God was sick. There is an empty place in my metaphysical shape that no one can reach: a cloister of silence that spoke with the fire of its voice muffled. On the day I was born, God was sick....
AFTERWORD
Reading what I have just written, I now believe I stopped precipitously, so that my story seems to have been slightly distorted, ending, as it did, not abruptly but in a kind of artificial mist of the sort sprayed onto stages to allow for difficult set changes. Why did I stop? Did some instinct discern a shape, the artist in me intervening to stop traffic, as it were? A shape. Or fate, as the...
UPON DISCOVERING MY ENTIRE SOLUTION TO THE...
If you have seen the snow
somewhere slowly fall
on a bicycle,
then you understand
all beauty will be lost,
and how even that loss
can be beautiful.
And if you have looked
at a winter garden
and seen not a winter garden
but a meditation on shape,
then you know why
this season is not
known for its words,
the cold too much
about the slowing of matter,
not enough about the making of...
WEATHER
My folder of poems
labeled “weather” holds
no clues as to whether
or not there’ll be any
weather to count on, say,
a hard rain like “little nails,” or
that deluge “plunging radiant”
now that we’ve plunged into war
and wars don’t stop like rain stops
like that last slow drizzle
onto the old tin bathroom vent
sweet hint of growth
in the soft wet drift north
fire or ice, fire...
December 2011
4 posts
DETAIL OF THE WOODS
I looked at all the trees and didn’t know what to do.
A box made out of leaves.
What else was in the woods? A heart, closing. Nevertheless.
Everyone needs a place. It shouldn’t be inside of someone else.
I kept my mind on the moon. Cold moon, long nights moon.
From the landscape: a sense of scale.
From the dead: a sense of scale.
I turned my back on the story. A sense of...
AND AFTER THIS
I have nothing holy to say. I paint his face with ashes from my cigarettes, tiny crosses on his forehead. He says my fingers smell like clementines, but his are covered in motor oil and sea salt. I tell him about my mother after surgery, about her face like a moon and my life lost in her round cheeks. I want to visit the cemetery, find a headstone meant for me. I will rub it onto paper with a...
from BOOKS
You don’t know it yet but what you’ll miss
is the books, heavy and fragrant and frayed,
the pages greasy, almost transparent, thinned
at the edges by hundreds of licked thumbs.
What you’ll remember is the dumb joy
of stumbling across a passage so perfect
it drums in your head, drowns out
the teacher and the lunch bell’s ring. You’ve stolen
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn from the...
from DOWN
i.
They were wrong about the sun.
It does not go down into
the underworld at night.
The sun leaves merely
and the underworld emerges.
It can happen at any moment.
It can happen in the morning,
you in the kitchen going through
your mild routines.
Plate, cup, knife.
All at once there’s no blue, no green,
no warning.
ii.
Old thread, old line
of ink twisting out into the clearness
we call...
I FORGOT TO TELL YOU THE MOST IMPORTANT PART
Without this knowledge, you’ll never make it: it’s one part fashion advice and two parts survivalist. Learn to talk to people so they think you’re honest but never be honest. Cooking eggs may save your life, so crack them, neat and firm, pour into the skillet, stir gently. Forget about your shoes; people will judge you by your shine, the imminent light you offer them. Be a lamppost in wilderness,...
November 2011
5 posts
WALKING TO MARTHA'S VINEYARD
And the ocean smells like lilacs in late August-how is that.
The light there muted (silver) as remembered light.
Do you have any children?
No, lucky for them.
Bad things happen when you get hands, dolphin.
Can you tell us a little bit about your upbringing?
There is no down or up in space or in the womb.
If they’d stabbed me to death on the day I was born, it would have been...
A CERTAIN KIND OF EDEN
It seems like you could, but
you can’t go back and pull
the roots and runners and replant.
It’s all too deep for that.
You’ve overprized intention,
have mistaken any bent you’re given
for control. You thought you chose
the bean and chose the soil.
You even thought you abandoned
one or two gardens. But those things
keep growing where we put them—
if we put them at all.
A certain kind of Eden...
TWO COUNTRIES
Skin remembers how long the years grow
when skin is not touched, a gray tunnel
of singleness, feather lost from the tail
of a bird, swirling onto a step,
swept away by someone who never saw
it was a feather. Skin ate, walked,
slept by itself, knew how to raise a
see-you-later hand. But skin felt
it was never seen, never known as
a land on the map, nose like a city,
hip like a city, gleaming...
HOW IT ADDS UP
what they don’t tell you is how it all ends. sure it was spring: volcanoes exploding in the opposite hemisphere. moon was igneous and adrift while they cheered your airship dreams of love and you felt soft and scared like a child lowered into a well or some balloon returning to a vast...
October 2011
8 posts
OCTOBER, AN ELEGY
The whole month of October is an elegy, a used book store getting rained on. This weather makes me read endings first. Partings and farewells, the way we’re baffled, startled when happiness falls. Let me tell you something about darkness, though, because there’s been enough about light. But first about the handwritten poem copied out in the back of a Rilke translation. It begins...
Cloistered
It was summer on the north coast, the wrong coast, they call it in the East. It was summer. And summer means rain. Rain disolved the islands in the sound, it buried mountains and turned the ocean gray. I listened to it rattle at my window. Funny, how you wake some days in the middle of the morning, and know somehow a part of the world had died. another language lifted from our tongues, another way...
Throw yourself like seed
Shake off this sadness, and recover your spirit sluggish you will never see the wheel of fate that brushes your heel as it turns going by, the man who wants to live is the man in whom life is abundant. Now you are only giving food to that final pain which is slowly winding you in the nets of death, but to live is to work, and the only thing which lasts is the work; start then, turn to the work....
THEORY OF LOST THINGS
Because loneliness and beauty are inseparable, one is often
mistaken for the other. As when it becomes difficult to eat
because the tears won’t stop coming though you’re hungry
and the food, undoubtedly, delicious: the peas, tomatoes,
pink slice of lamb and small round dollop of white beans.
Beauty and loneliness are there in the girl you remember
seated on a bench beside the...
EMPTYING TOWN
I want to erase your footprints
from my walls. Each pillow
is thick with your reasons. Omens
fill the sidewalk below my window: a woman
in a party hat, clinging
to a tin-foil balloon. Shadows
creep slowly across the tar, someone yells, ‘Stop!’
and I close my eyes. I can’t watch
as this town slowly empties, leaving me
strung between bon-voyages, like so many clothes
on a line, the...
Stop all the clocks (or 'Funeral Blues')
Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone, Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone, Silence the pianos and with muffled drum Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come. Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead, Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves, Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton...
OCTOBER
1 There’s this shape, black as the entrance to a cave. A longing wells up in its throat like a blossom as it breathes slowly. What does the world mean to you if you can’t trust it to go on shining when you’re not there? and there’s a tree, long-fallen; once the bees flew to it, like a procession of messengers, and filled it with honey. 2 I said to the chickadee, singing his heart out in the...
September 2011
4 posts
DEAR ONE ABSENT THIS LONG WHILE
It has been so wet stones glaze in moss; everything blooms coldly. I expect you. I thought one night it was you at the base of the drive, you at the foot of the stairs, you in a shiver of light, but each time leaves in wind revealed themselves, the retreating shadow of a fox, daybreak. We expect you, cat and I, bluebirds and I, the stove. In May we dreamed of wreaths burning on bonfires over which...
from MYSELF-BE NOON TO HIM
I was thinking about a time before war, when the sea was not a border and we dove into the punishing waves. Some shore-noises I forget: the hour shifting with the tide-turn like an octave drop, sand-scatter against our bodies, phantom cries from phantom children. I want to write a poem with nothing in it. No more birds tracing the coast, no anxious clock, no lists of loss, no song other than …...
from DAWN
Child waking up in a dark room
screaming I want my duck back, I want my duck back
in a language nobody understands in the least —
There is no duck.
But the dog, all upholstered in white plush —
the dog is right there in the crib next to him.
Years and years — that’s how much time passes.
All in a dream. But the duck —
no one knows what happened to that.
LOUISE GLUCK
THE THRIFT SHOP DRESSES
I slid the white louvers shut so I could stand in your closet a little while among the throng of flowered dresses you hadn’t worn in years, and touch the creases on each of their sleeves that smelled of forgiveness and even though you would still be alive a few more days I knew they were ready to let themselves be packed into liquor store boxes simply because you had asked that of them, and...
August 2011
6 posts
CITY OF LAVENDER
I had everything I ever wanted to say to you organized in my head but forgot it all when you took my palm in your hand and with your index finger wrote “disaster.” If you were to ask me how I ended up here, I don’t even know. Every night at 8:25 I can’t believe it’s already 8:25 and I’m so happy it’s only 8:25. Sometimes I find tragedy reassuring. Sometimes the cat licks my neck. I don’t want to...
Everyday
You’ve left the big storms behind you now. You didn’t ask then why you were born, where you came from, where you were going to, you were just there in the storm, in the fire. But it’s possible to live in the everyday as well, in the grey quiet day, set potatoes, rake leaves, carry brushwood. There’s so much to think about here in the world, one life is not enough for it...
THE SCIENCES SING A LULLABY
Physics says: go to sleep. Of course you’re tired. Every atom in you has been dancing the shimmy in silver shoes nonstop from mitosis to now. Quit tapping your feet. They’ll dance inside themselves without you. Go to sleep.
Geology says: it will be all right. Slow inch by inch America is giving itself to the ocean. Go to sleep. Let darkness lap at your sides. Give darkness an inch. You aren’t...
INVENTING A HORSE
Inventing a horse is not easy. One must not only think of the horse. One must dig fence posts around him. One must include a place where horses like to live; or do when they live with humans like you. Slowly, you must walk him in the cold; feed him bran mash, apples; accustom him to the harness; holding in mind even when you are tired harnesses and tack cloths and saddle oil to keep the saddle...
THE SECOND COMING
Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. Surely some revelation is at hand; ...
CARVING BODIES LIKE PUMPKINS
This is for breaching thresholds, for holding money and things like tragedy too closely to skin. This was never about organs or sifting through scars. This was always about counting the things everyone holds onto, about relinquishing names and setting fire to faces. What is left when the poems have been burned out of bones? nothing but marrow and feathers. (why won’t anyone say these things out...
July 2011
2 posts
CARACAS
I wish slitting the wrist of the clock
would let this moment last forever –
your tongue so deep in my ear
it feels like a paintbrush, coating
the dark, peeling walls inside my head
with a carmine veneer. I was expecting
you to run, when you saw the cartilage
in the closet. I was prepared to chase
after and whisper you have beautiful
footsteps, when the truth is you make
my toes tingle...
A Valley Like This
Sometimes you look at an empty valley like this, and suddenly the air is filled with snow. That is the way the whole world happened— there was nothing, and then… But maybe some time you will look out and even the mountains are gone, the world become nothing again. What can a person do to help bring back the world? We have to watch it and then look at each other. Together we hold it close and...
April 2011
65 posts
A Ritual To Read To Each Other (Mom's favorite...
If you don’t know the kind of person I am and I don’t know the kind of person you are a pattern that others made may prevail in the world and following the wrong god home we may miss our star. For there is many a small betrayal in the mind, a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood storming out to play through the broken dyke. And...
TO THE YOUNG MAN ON THE BRIDGE
The newspaper caption read: “Two officers talk to a young man, name withheld, as he stands on a bridge above the Merrimack River, distraught over learning that his mother is terminally ill.”
When I first saw you
I could glance up from your image in the paper
and out her kitchen doorway watch
my mother trim her artemisia,
scraps of silver trailing
her green wheelbarrow.
And I imagined...