POEM OF DEPARTURE

            Let yourself go: mourn in the evening,

            with your curtains pulled open and your lights turned on;

Wail, from dusk to daybreak, straying across your neighbor’s yard.

Go into the hedgerow, safe for a blind bird’s sleep.

Look!  The moon ladles diamonds over clouds,

and still there is time for your wounds to heal.

            Pray for the starved and cold departed.

            Plead for capable hands,

feeling to reverse the sun’s dementia.         

            Let yourself go; trust the gusting wind

            and the window's elbow.

            

THE NAVIGATOR

First, the lost guy says, “At last,

a street I recognize.”

Then he asks, “Are you who I’ve come to see?”

“It’s not that I have to be,” I say,

“We’re doing things differently now.”

Inventing the chair, women used colors

men were afraid of. 

It worked.

Priapus dressed up, before he sat down.

I could see that the kids were busy,

out in the garden, weeding, 

so I said, “Alright, let’s got for a walk.”

We went around the corner.

“To fit me for a suit,” he said,

“We’ll measure this little world.”

“Then we can describe it,” I said,

            “of my own making, but another’s impulse.”

He smiled.

“You’ve rendered it well,” he said,

            “especially my fondness for light;

soon we will part the black flames

            on its horizon.”

THE UNCREATED LIFE

You considered shifting your position.
The windows across the room were open,
but you were holding your words in
for the visitor.
What might have happened
had already happened
and no longer seemed important.
You had moved through plenty of stories
before you surrendered,
when the voices and hands that took over
fit the comfort of light.
Escape routes shape
the created world,
as the outside heralds mercy.

CABOOSEMAN

In a country without good-byes,

the train doesn’t slow down at the station

for a small boy’s eyes

to catch up to its clatter,

but as I hurtle by I see

his hand wave when he spots me.

Standing at the back of the caboose,

I see everything the train passes by;

if I could reach my eyes further

into the distance before me,

I would never lose sight of the past.

On the station platform,

the boy stays angled, looking

into the fresh snow

that falls between us.

From under his cap, he watches me

quickly diminished by the very future

I avoid, not turning around.

To him, I’ve become an apparition;

escaped from the convergence

of time with space,

I float through wet air’s warp,

hands parting frontward

and head turned downwards, flutter-kicking

across the thick, white vertical lines

that drive past me, obliterating

horizontals.

Each instant a snowflake touches

ground below me, I see a soul

escape up, joining in

an invisible traffic

equal in mass and density

to the downfall.

These souls climb the falling snow,

grasping each flake.

Not one goes untouched.

As soul after soul moves upwards,                                   

their triangular yellow outlines bleed

into brightness.

In some, I can still faintly see

the blue circles and red squares

their shimmering contains,

like memories.

Mine have weighed me down.

I feel them tug me back onto the train,

and I am sped away.

                    - for Kit Donnelly

THE TWO-WAY FIGURE

No one claims to have seen the God
in whose image we are made.
       We too go unseen,
when we go as God.

The sky is fuchsia, orange
flames hem the black earth.
       Refraction and impedance
betray our whereabouts.

Whose persons do we move with now,
       where we are seen?
Our impression makes our likeness;
we are figures for ourselves.

TRILLIUM

I would not want to live
inside anyone else’s clarity;
we always come to be confused.
“Who am I,” she asks, panicked,

when logic fails to put a face on sense.
Trillium, I think, shocked
by the purple of the sockets
her eyes haunt.

Chaired alongside me, Mother fidgets.
Her father, dead now forty years,
and her brothers, out of touch,
are the men she talks to,

those present more oppressive
than the passed.
“I don’t exist,” she says,
turning from my silence;

who, then, is this other
that gains robustness
the farther back-lit
memory goes to work?

Presently, she laughs, recalls
her childhood neighbor
bowing, reins in hands, astride his horse
in a yard only she has seen.

Now she can reach to pat my leg,
for I’m here still, where dusk
puts a patina of fine light
on clouds I cannot ease.

ORTHOPEDICS

The leg is not what you thought it was.

No longer are you walking

to and fro the reconstructed

memories your mind wanders.

Well-lit corridors are a way

outside time, and their stations

hum with voices from around the world.

On your back, unmoving, day after day,

you begin to take apart

what remains of your person.

Someone else can have the sunglasses

and the wallet.  The watch

needs a timer and a reset key.

On one side of the leg, doctors have pulled

skin together with stitches;

the other side’s fish-like design

is a graft taking hold.

An external fixator extends

from foot to hip and keeps in place

countless fractures.

The tree is a painful fact.

The body has been broken

by its puzzle: pieces of bone

that float in the sky.

You recall the brilliance of this sky

and that it did not let you fall asleep.

NOT ONE THING

The heart, first to depart,

is soon followed

by the other parts,

falling, as will being,

through the many

fractured distractions.

The stone mouth idles.

The pining lover,

whose longing was misplaced,

was angry

even as a child.

Of what could he repent?

The different days are all

a trial of moods.

Embers will be sifted

behind the eyes,

winds kindled in the ribs.

Please, may this be so.

May we not break

at the sharp point

or impede

the wheeled vehicle

our sleep has balanced.

Through inevitable

refinement of love,

may we frame fragments

in the generous

number of the house.

DARKNESS HARBORED A FUGITIVE VOICE

Every event has a cause

but the sequence of events is random

and nothing happens for a reason

or by necessity

You might have argued differently

had you trusted logic

for the absence of character

that belied your achievements

Company had eased delirium

Unfamiliar caregivers brought blankets

and pieces of meat to the vigil

they sat as you strengthened

You belonged, after all, elsewhere

It was time to leave your personal space

where the hoot owl called 

as sadness tumbled the river within

The shit you had smeared across your face

could have been streaks of painted color

and you wanted to prove fearless

even with your fallen understanding

DEATH IS AN ANIMAL

There is a word

spoken with authority

and a person

who lost his sense
hearing the word

You have seen yourself act

    like an animal

and would again, if you could,

    with human footing

You are apart from nothing

The parts make sounds

holding their unity

at a distance

GROTTO OF THE GNOSTIC ANGEL

The past comes to an end

reversing itself,

as we restore the future,

contriving to salvage

its garden

of ornate resemblance

We had pushed our memories

through cities,

trusting to find a sky

that flattened land for grasses

the unadorned could plow.

The heat was heavy with water

and the stones nudged into place glistened

alongside bits of chinaware and colored glass

travelled to set up house

(and house again)

wherein we recognized

our persons re-assembled

The two who conspired

to hold each other off

yield as one, oafish,

unable to stand upright

without a hand to help

Wings, no less unlikely,

catch the eye, averted

from the guardian’s

remote and placid gaze

above the whirlwind

of parents

driving youth back

to the old country

grandparents remembered 

We go back with trowels 

and wheelbarrows

to revive the grotto

with forms of promise

fulfilled and then abandoned

and hues of restlessness

inimical to settlement

The angel stays implacable,

as if a figurehead at sea

TWO HEARTS

I brought two hearts to birds.

The first, a silver fledgling

in the landscape’s one tree

polished the sky

when it took wing,

and in its place,

a brilliant sun

declined to nest.

Years ran down feelings,

as if the brooding

had not hatched.

The light came on

one night in the kitchen’s dark

when I opened the refrigerator,

which was empty,

except for the frozen raven,

a past century's relic

on its Wedgwood platter.

As I reached

to pick it up,

the bird’s skin turned translucent

and I could see the heart

pumping inside its cavity.

My hands reached inside the bird 

past the liver and into the sac

where I cupped, good-sized,

and lifted - as if wholesome - 

freedom's intention.

I am holding the heart

in my hands

and it is spilling blood

onto the floor.

The tenderness I feel

mixes with yearning

for the redness flatters

its aeration.

I don’t want to explain

myself into trouble,

taking back 

what had belonged to me. 

LOCK-DOWN

  “Escape did not promise anything worthwhile.”

                                                    - Chekhov

The rickety door opens out

from a dark room

onto a screened porch,

as far as one can go

(without violence)

in the faltering make-up 

of sense. 

Pine boughs sweep

a view of the uncut 

meadow birds prepare

in faded light

for lock-down.

The bent figure 

of an aged woman

he had once seen buried

continues its ceaseless rooting.