Yearly Archives: 2018

November hymnal (13)

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November hymnal (13)

No silence tonight. The light bulbs hum.
The washer in the basement sends

a thick pulse through the walls and floors.
Cats scratch carpet. Steam surges

up pipes to the radiators in the bedrooms.
When I turn everything off, grief is singing,

in the dark outside a house in my mind,
and though it’s in a foreign language,

each November I know a few more of the words.
In that song everything rhymes, leaves

pushed into a pile by the rain, my mother’s
favorite paintbrush, an old recipe typewritten

and amended with a blue Bic pen. No matter
what you try to throw in the song, it’s in perfect

harmony with grief. November night. A low
front off the coast. A bad painting of a mocking

bird by an artist we never knew. No silence.

November hymnal (12)

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November hymnal (12)

That day the house hit my brain with a piece
of its basement it was like I finally saw death’s

name. Like death was revealed as a real person,
someone you’d asked to see if the right size

shoes were in the back and who disappeared
and never came back out but now here he is

years later, he’s cradling this box in his arms
and he’s close enough so you realize he must

have an actual name, he’s not the devil or any
supernatural thing, he’s just the person who will

put on the shoes for you, you’d better sit down
for this, and when he leans down to fix the laces

there are more people behind him, an unending
line of all the people who’ve been helping you

toward your death, from before you were born
up to the last face you will see. I am on the

stairs, checking my head for blood. I’m going
to recline here for a bit, like a greek god, and figure

out what hit me. I look up the stairs at my family,
Down the stairs at my legs, sprayed there like graffiti.

At all the people in the world. The escalator of names
Drifting down. I have had those shoes forever.

November hymnal (11)

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November hymnal (11)

The bare trees reveal mountains unseen in summer.
Leaves scrape across the road like the words

Of unseen translators looking for an original
Language to give a new season to. I can almost see

This poem assembling as I compose it, rising
In a pile where the wind ebbs and only you,

With a scar on your chest where each word
Thin and twirling on its stem left your branching

Pulse after negotiating the passage between light
And life, only you would stop to read it, unseen

By the neighbors bending to their black bags and rakes,
Your bare shoulders glowing as sun breaks through.

November hymnal (10)

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November hymnal (10)

Cause and effect cross-hatch the sketch
of death that gives it heartless depth, like weather.

Clouds pour from the trees and their rain is ash;
Memory, the fifth season, the language of sand.

You’ve scanned the barcode in this hand:
What minute mistake precedes the crash?

He burned alive inside his car. He already knew
these cities would not hold. In her bed the black

breath choked her but was not the cause, just the body’s
flag of surrender. Her last look could not be read.

She had all the time to prepare but none of the tools.
No understanding in the wide open eye. Too soon,

The promise of the pared appleskin moon:
so very little light is needed to die.

November hymnal (9)

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November hymnal (9)

The clouds are grazing on the hills of morning light
Waiting for it to get colder so they can become tigers

And bite everyone. For now they are just the shadow
Of the swishing tail. November, stop pacing.

You can’t pull us apart like a vulture on the road.
You’re not October’s thrill of departure but a cooling

Afterthought. You don’t see the sharp gloom of the departed
Who themselves don’t know they’re gone. Who are us all

Each to our someone who’s forgotten us. I tell myself
That nothing lasts, but I remember the first time I heard

You laugh, a prowling like a new word that could
Swallow this season whole and leave footprints in the snow

Still yet to fall, like those flowers that bloom in February
Or the dry shadow of a paper delivered in the rain.

November hymnal (8) / for Doris

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November hymnal (8) / for Doris

Here in the dead center of autumn
Comes the voice on the phone.

I am outside of the house, outside
My father’s Explorer, on the side

Of a hilly street I call home. I was
Looking at the library across the lawn

Across the street when I heard the words
She was dead. Just then, as I stood

Inside nothing. And the past was past
Me, like a car on its way to the library

Traveling too fast on a neighborhood
Street past a standing man, nothing

More than a pellet of the present, on
a bleak night’s road beneath which the miles

Spin and the signs have gone dark.

November hymnal (7)

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November hymnal (7)

Like walking in the afterwards
I smell October’s grim vanity in the air

and beneath my feet little liquids in stems
of star shaped leaves fret July losses

and beyond that along the stubs of garden cut
a stray moonflower waits like a scout

Oh months I have no more time for you
I know you made everything up till now it was

all you but each of you could see around
the corner of the library December tensing

in the shadows already forgetting why
it will launch out as I walk by and take

the wind out of me and not
one of you warned me

November hymnal (6) / Trench cello

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November hymnal (6) / Trench cello

When the box was out of ammunition
someone now dead made a cello of it

and tuned it to the trenches as mud spilled
over the edges and they played elegies

for themselves in the space between concussions
listening for those who’d not hear their voices

again unless they were as lucky as that
ammunition box outliving its usefulness

and becoming song

November hymnal (5)

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November hymnal (5)

The leaves alight with morning rain fall
straight like skimming stones thrown

wrong    light as our names like our lives
they did not have too far to fall

On the morning air your soul floats
over the frost   newly alone    leaves

a scattered gritty rainbow reaching
for the one color it can’t contain

Blue soul blue sky blue frost
like all the memories of laughter

November hymnal (4)

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November hymnal (4)

On a cold November morning a man’s
Soul puts on his fifty year old body like a scar

Of his twenty year old’s dream of this morning.
The dream itself was a jacket that wouldn’t fit

Any future. The man steps under the maples
Across the street as the sun takes out its

Paintbrush; he chases leaves to the grass.
His children join him, stuffing their pockets

With color that will never go to ground.
With every stumble he gets younger.

With a gold and red season between his fingers
He takes off his jacket and leans

Like a bare tree against the sky.