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
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
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.
All the angles of the sun on tomorrow’s hours
will be awkward like when you arrive late
to a friendship that began before you
understood who your friends were
If you catch up then everything changes
the number of leaves on the autumn trees
the sun rose over that morning
or the hour of the note left on the door
that is still on the door of the heart
though it said nothing less fleeting
than any butterfly of fate
Tonight while you sleep an hour will
come back but from which night?
when you could count the moons
you’d loved together on a single hand
or to a life that has been waiting for you
but now is going on as if you had been there
all along? maybe it never needed you
like the moon never needed you walking
on it but walk on it we did
Showbiz being
a thing of tickets
and tickets of time
and place thoroughly
entertaining in their own
right and time of seconds
and place of firsts
as in first happenings
replacing what took
place there as if staged
for a closeup before
flowering into song
and song of summary
with the perspective of
an oncoming roundhouse
right to the flowering face
of death for which you
need no ticket and are
never late god I hate
showbiz
Now is the blowing song of leaf lidded
lips lifted to the sky in the color that
knows love leaves. Now is the open
your books to page reach for me in
your dreams eyes. Now is the parting
from the family tree. Now the figure
eights of indeterminate holding,
Now golden combs in the air, now
the squirrel sprinting beneath the
carriage of wheels at the hour
That disappears and returns to
The hour before. That brings sun
Down at the third cup of coffee.
A man, empty-handed, carries a great hole
Into the grocery store. He pushes a cart
Into which he drops vital things: bread,
Oil, wine, coffee. Brownie mix for the kids.
Nothing goes in the hole
Which he sometimes carries inside
His body, sometimes twirls absently
Like a ring too loose to safely wear
That nevertheless will not fall off his finger.
Nothing comes out of the hole though
Sometimes he thinks that’s because
Everything has already gone out of it,
It needed to be that way to be a hole
And so empty it can’t contain even darkness,
Or a single name, or the weight
Of a hand on his back, the sound
Of water being turned off, the wing
Beats of an unseen bird, the as yet
Unknown cost of everything in the cart
Summer’s running behind feels a bit mean
To a person already running behind,
A forced vertigo of sorts I can’t calibrate
My own behind-ness to: here in the early
Autumn of my life I’m still sweating
A summer boy’s things and the blurring
Faces of those I run by on the street
Of my life. I’m worried about what I’m
Missing by not standing still. By never
Getting up to speed. Time runs ahead,
The orange soles of her sneakers glistening
Over night’s damp suburban grass.
One wet evening, in the light of a white-faced lawn
Jockey, she’ll be waiting, stretching her legs
For a last run with me.
The wind let me live
By not arriving. The ten thousand
wheels of the highway had stopped
And we sat on its back, still
As food in cans. And the dark
Grew quiet as we killed
Our engines to save fuel.
Mere hours away
The sirens set
Apart each moment in its stillness:
Duration’s blue and red lights.
They bounced off the neighbors’ houses
And into the distance, arriving
At some place where there was
No distance, and the aftermath
Of that. Then the windless rain
Like a chorus that is the song
Of the end of shape. Where will
I be when the one drop of rain
That is my life, descending with the rest,
Bursts against the earth, no longer
The same but exactly the same,
As many molecules as the stars
in a gathering puddle whose surface
riddled by wind reflects the sole
Of a child’s new sneakers
Nineteenth of September, nearly supper.
First the trees start whispering questions.
Leaves swerve to ground like practice seasons.
Is nothing too green for grief, the trees ask.
The answer scrapes the top of the sky.
Bulldozer uprooting forever for the new estates.
Is it over? Almost. It’s almost over.
Then rain, soft, like em-dashes
Between invisible words, unspoken charters.
Whatever they are building up there
Has been redacted already in the unseen
Document of the future, what’s left
Of our uncomposed lives. Word on the tip
Of the tongue in a mouth that closes.
Like clouds closing on a patch of blue.
The thunder has forgotten its voice
Is summer’s, and throttles like a biker
Down a darkening road.
Translations from the English 