Told me to wait another two nights.
and the truth would rise like ice cubes
In a celebratory drink. Without taste
But accentuating the taste that’s there
Already, then adding volume to it
While weakening the taste but by then
It’s not the taste you’re after is it and where
Has it got to finally, absorbed, invisible?
The moon looks full but it’s not. Not that
It matters but it does. Like other things
That never happened but did anyway
And because they never happened never end
The dusk sky is a gameboard of bats,
everyone’s lost apologies for what
They knew they did wrong but could not find
The words to admit. Homeless things.
The poet’s night shift has me emotional–
The moon’s pendulum scythe swings
Below the tree line and I wake up astonished
To be alive. The poem holds a word
To my throat and the word is your missing
touch. In the world are some animals whose feet
Never touch the ground. Birds who only
Land on the uncertainty of open water.
Just as in you there are poems
that may never land on the tree of language
But whose wingbeats keep you awake,
Whose migration over open space
Turns everyone’s heads though they hear
Only your voice on a quiet morning.
All winter the days will grow– into winter’s death
Where light and darkness equal out.
Penultimately just nine days in it serves us
To pretend the end of anything–
So make your list. Sum it up
Like any cat lifting its tail to spray
Against the furniture. Already the leaves
Hiding like a punchline to a joke not yet told
Are laughing at how quickly the living forget
The cold, the weird verse of numbing wind
I hear in my mother’s painting of snow
And sunset, starlings on the highest branches
Of black walnut, as light as the best and worst
Of any year, as gone as the dead who won’t come back.
It comes back in the framework of an ache
New to the knee though you’ve had no injury
Stretching and the gap closes instantly
Between confidence and a death you’ve seen already
It’s not a ghost which keeps you up at night
It’s certainty any telltale pain appearing suddenly
The ghost is your memory, incomplete, waiting
The last memory that it comes back.
The necessary second witness. Pointing finger of a lost tribe
Finding its place again. Behold the blessed castaway.
Even her age meant a completion and a return.
How can we trust anything when every thing
Means something? Is every father the face of god
Until the glimpse of the infant visage, God the beginning?
Seven dozen years waiting against the stone of the dead.
Father stone, husband stone. Waiting as the days dry up
To make the math work wonders. What else did she see
In the intervening hours but a name in another tongue
the same backwards as forwards? I would believe you
Against all the world believes. I cast a pebble at the well
And the hand that caught it before it fell
Translations from the English 