In the dream the same beach
we’ve never been to together
is calling though once we stood
on a jetty watching the sun
read the gathering clouds
the riot act sometimes you have
to lower yourself as well to circumstances
to rise some place else entirely
*
The waves here
slide across and beneath
each moment grand tectonics
some brought to level
annihilation by incremental loss
some subsumed by a surge
of gain so that what they’ve gained
gains them in final shape
Waves crash—a murmur
in the moon’s ear—still asking
who is pulling whom
Moon over city
of ten million lights as
seen by only one
Storm fells big branches
while gossamer lines linger—
the strand between us
*
Long after strong rain
moves on, forgotten, moss on
branches remembers
*
Light flickers inside and out.
Dove on shed roof hears
a thousand unseen frogs
*
The day starts again
hours before dusk. In sunlight
palmetto fronds drip.
He gets around, that Goat. Most recently sighted with baguette and coffee in the vicinity of St Helena by poet Robert Okaji, and taking respite and comfort at the Bonita…
photo courtesy of Robert Okaji
photo courtesy Robert Okaji
I am still awaiting the promised photographic evidence of our yarn-horned friend on a bluff overlooking the Aegean Sea…and other places far and wide.
Distant motorbike resonates like a bullfrog
in the summer dark, a mating call of bars
closing and the steam of recent rain
rising to the reducing horizon
My boy falls asleep by my side each night
cats sometimes fight in the alley even in rain
walking in the hallway past the open door
one daughter sleeps suspended by pillows
the other flings everything aside and sprawls
face down and then I’m here room as wide
as a hundred year old house and your guitar
sits waiting for you and I sit waiting
I finally hear the crickets they’re late this summer
when a poem begins to emerge it begins
like stink bugs and hard backed bugs
charging the window screen like rhinos
then when all that fails like moths alighting
holding their ground like kites in instant photos
and when that fails I finish my tea and listen
the crickets I hear are from a midnight walk
in Ithaca on Coddington Road 28 years ago
in the dark of no streetlights and miles of field
when my soul first disappeared into a million
songs with no refrain and when that all fails
I go out and look at the gangly weed of a plant
in the front yard I spared from the weeder for
No good reason one afternoon the next morning
it was full of modest flowers the color of late May
skies closing up at noon like it was the old school
diner of the plant world since then I have noticed
it everywhere on the highway’s side every morning
the short lived beauty newly bloomed each day
and I think I’ll write about that but cannot find
a poetic way to describe a plant made entirely
of old ladies’ elbows and eye wrinkles that turns
into a goddess in the cool morning air so
I sit waiting along with your guitar it is not a question
you will come up and carefully take it
from its case and hold it and find the chord
that brings me back to this
I don’t believe in spirits but I believed in the spirit
of my first unborn daughter because I saw her
framed by the blue gray screen, a face with expression
and a body with movement. What else constitutes
a spirit if not those? My wife’s great aunt Julia
pulled onto route 17 in Murrell’s Inlet and into
the path of a white pickup truck; she was flown
to Charleston not by angels but by helicopter
and when we saw her she was still alive
but I knew whatever was Aunt Julia was not there
and I resented when a hospital chaplain came in
to pray with us over her. Couldn’t he see that
her spirit had already fled or been knocked out of her
by four tons of steel? Spirit as more than consciousness
or less, as essence, a vector of character even before
experience presses its thumbs into your clay, a vector
which I recognized by its absence in Aunt Julia
having seen it preside so often over a cup of tea. But of my daughter’s
spirit I cannot claim the same familiarity. And how
did I feel it was with us that painful night
flashing in the air around our grief
as panicked as we were, the three of us sure
there was some solution, a way to get back
to the world just before that evening?
*
I don’t get visits from spirits that often. Aunt Julia
has never come back to have tea or hoot her
wise southern laugh with me in a kitchen of my dreams.
I’ve not once seen the face of my unborn daughter and
on occasion I think if she had not left us that night
the three who came after her would never have
existed. And who then might have? Because I don’t believe
in spirits I have even discounted visits from the only
two to keep up with me, my first pet Tuna Cat
who suffered much before his death and my poetry teacher
Archie; they last came to see me together. Archie had a new place
just under the earth and though the floor was all dirt
it had a kitchen and everything. And Tuna, sitting
on the counter. “I like it here, Jeff,” Archie said to me,
and I think, I think he meant it.
Dusk is finally gone but it has left a mark on the dark green slopes
like pencil has been rubbed over everything
You know there are trees there pines and oaks maples others
but now all you can verify is that it’s a hill with the disposition
of trees or a tendency towards treeness but it’s too dark
to prove the trees are there and we’re moving too fast
following a line we can’t see the end of but which we know
ends before daylight
It starts outside you, a brush of an arm
or accidental glance indifferent even
and then there is no helping for it
scratching the itch they say spreads it
makes it worse but it really travels
only where it’s made original contact
occasionally it’s delayed getting under your
skin waiting on and responding to your own
chemistry and the building up
of a defensive response is what inflames
things so where did it first
touch you it will stay there a while like all
things it will run its course it doesn’t
matter what you do once you’ve got it
Translations from the English 