Another walking for a while,
Another mile
I have put between me
And death. I rest.
I don’t know how fast
Death’s traveling.
August 1
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The owl’s eyes
The owl’s wings bat off the morning mist
As they lift. The owl’s juvenile horns are rolling
Waves of sea foam that push the scalloped sounds
Of night into form and sense. The light gold talons,
Both soft and sharp, wrap around a branch of air.
Missing the mouse of morning. Meanwhile,
And I mean in every sense of mean,
The owl’s eyes are traveling, out beyond
Its youthful death, in the company of ants;
In all directions death can take the owl’s
Eyes go, unseeing pieces of marvelous flights
We could never take, unmoving beneath the green
Knives of the peonies, past their own spring flowering.
Two ants crisscross my glove as I place the owl
Back on the earth. Now I know where vision goes
And why it’s first to go and feed what cannot see.
A poem will outlive this
When I read Mei Yao-ch’en writing
In 1058 about his wife and son making
Roundcakes as protection against the eclipse
Banging on mirrors in the middle of a dynasty
that created gunpowder and flamethrowers landmines
And grenades also paper money
I know that a poem will outlive this moment
Even if it’s about the moon which has never
Not shown up I may want to think there are
More important things to think about, I may
Investigate and report and write and lose
Sleep waking worried on this same world my
Children must inherit but where else will I
Safely hurl this palmful of shadow
Being alive, being dead
1.
When the world is asleep except for me
And the sky an untouched coloring book page
And the coming days
Words too small to read
And the wind gusts are songs I forget
I’ve sung to you but your dreams
Remind me, like branches by a window, then
In the bed of my soul two bodies stir.
When the world is asleep except for me
Peace and terror trade their limbs and fiercely wait
2.
Being dead, I’m a book no one has read.
My name neither stone nor bread.
What I remember cannot be changed.
Though a wreath of angels
Dance in circles round my head they ought
To know better. The past is taut,
The future loose and harrowing as a hive
Cracked open, that’s being alive.
Masks
The mask that kept the face of pain behind it had no eyes.
It’s hard to see through pain, and hard for those
With eyes to see the pain. Unfocused and ivory, with a rose
And tear upon the cheek, it’s blameless, like a Mardi Gras prize.
The mask worn over something else, the things
We didn’t talk about, pursed lips but had no voice
As if it all was fate, or all by choice;
It stiffens our features with the news death brings.
The mask that bent intelligence to doubt —
That mask — that took me far away from you:
I cannot claim it made my eyes more blue
Or self more safe. We wear them without
Knowing, diminish as they’re growing, only endings clearer
As we clatter to the floor, surprised we were the mask and not the wearer.
I want a poem to wake me up
I want the world to be quiet enough that I can hear it.
I want to see the drought-choked grass I dropped my lame dog in
to pee this morning grow
Three inches in an hour after the great deluge of Sunday afternoon.
Now it’s sunny, can you feel it, and the street is dry but the grass I swear has grown
three
Inches in the hour I wasn’t looking and I missed it.
I want to see the pale wren again who talked to me from the gutter of this morning
And sounded like a cricket trying to throw his voice.
I swear I turned away for just a second and the grass is longer and twisting like caught
In the middle of an exotic dance. And its green even in early August is the color of June.
I want to take a nap on the green comfy chair of the color of dancing grass
And not the dark green sinus infection chair in my house and not have that damned cat
Yuki
Settle on my stomach purr-snoring. I want the black walnut trees with their spinning
Leaves like a game of chance to make something of the breeze. I want them to reach
Through the walls of my house and say, what did you do to my brother? What did
You do to him and shake me to pieces because they are their brothers’ keepers.
I want a poem to wake me up and tell me it was just a dream.
Last day of the year, 2023
Hands in pockets of an old jacket,
On a tree-bent sideroad to pick up
Sunday paper: Breaking: the moon behind
my shoulder and the sun ahead of me, over
Opposite horizons: who’s to say what
Is rising and what is falling: certainly not,
On this last morning of the worst year I’ve
Survived, the Sunday Washington Post.
Fifty-ninth autumn
All things irrevocable, every year, every hour.
All appeal a grovel that takes another minute down,
Another day, another dawn.
All regret of miniscule assistance.
The leaves on all the trees still green.
In the harbor of the early evening sky
They all sing the same song
And we listen without hearing
And the song bears no resistance.
Christmas Eve, early morning
Time, relentless wind. Awake this winter night
I hear its empty roar, filled with angry nothing
Passing on its way to nothing beyond the ice
On our window pane. When the sun rises
The ice may last a day or two, that’s how cold
The wind has made us, but it’ll melt when we’re
Not looking, like it was never there, like we
Won’t be someday. My hand is on your hip.
Our bodies’ warmth a single thing I won’t
remember when I’m dead, so I’ll remember
Now, unless our minds are like the wind
And carry some fragment from our time
Together, dislodged from this world and
Blown to the next, together, or empty,
Or empty, together, no memory but the thing
Itself, afloat and away, that’s the both of us.
—for Mary, 12/24/22
Late October
The sun molts behind its cloud chrysalis.
Into something colder. Something staring
Through a dirty window. Face with no
Features from which there’s no sense of being seen
But the possibility of being seen feels like a violation
Of a rule older than writing. Who’s breaking it? This old
Morning, who is in the wrong? Starlings carelessly
Scribble song across the lower skies. It’s fun
Being a troubled young man; but a troubled
Old man is a different bird. And the trouble
Bursts out slowly, like a butterfly pulls
Itself from its insufficient tomb.
Translations from the English 