Category Archives: Poetry

Vanishing Tracks (I)

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Vanishing Tracks (I)

On my journey home
the clouds obscure the one road up the mountain
like gods who long
since forgetting what they have made
come this way again
recognizing nothing

A hundred hazard lights blinking
of strangers slowing through that veil
could be seen from a distance
as some kind of worship

A half hour later
the clouds will be gone the road will not remember
they were ever here

On the mountain’s other side
I see them again
three heads on the sky’s coins
all looking away
and then again above the valley floor ahead of me
a tail of a giant sea creature twelve miles long
diving into the horizon

I can bear the gods forgetting all they have made
until they no longer exist
even in memory
and have made nothing
how much heavier though is your forgetting
because I know you
did what the gods could not

Still I will follow these vanishing tracks

*

Note: The three title poems from my 2011 book Vanishing Tracks, and another poem entitled “Sestina, with Christmas Lights,” were written in honor of my mother, who at the time of their composition had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s but was still living with my father. These poems, of course, are about memory, family, the sacred nature of motherhood, loss, and loss suffered across a family in a manner that is keenly unique but which impacts the rest of your life’s views on everything, from identity to suffering to love.

In a Dream [from Vanishing Tracks]

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In a Dream [from Vanishing Tracks]

In a dream I am in a car
racing backwards in slow motion
through a neighborhood being progressively
unbuilt, earth and foundation
appearing as shingles and windows fly away,
sod pulled up from red clay, native
shrubs waiting for the foundations to liquidize
and evaporate then moving back in,
and finally large rocks which we
never moved to make way for the houses
that were not built after all
and the road itself turns to gravel then dirt
undergrowth and pine needles rushing in,
and as the car itself begins to loosen
the sky darkens with shadows
coming towards me at the
speed of trees never cut down

*

[Another poem from from the series “Markers” and the book Vanishing Tracks.]

Bridgeport, CT [from Vanishing Tracks]

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Bridgeport, CT [from Vanishing Tracks]

On an empty court surrounded by empty lots
A man is dribbling a basketball. He stands
Around the three point line, jukes and feints
Away from an invisible defender, pulls up to
Shoot, changes his mind, dribbles again and
Steps to his left, maybe being doubled up
At this point though I can’t see anyone there,
And no one is around to see him pick up
His dribble yet again, no whistle blows, so he dances a
Little closer, the ball back over his head like a stone
In a medieval catapult. There is nothing between him
And the basket. He pauses, and dribbles again.
I crane my neck to watch him negotiate all that emptiness
As the train rounds a bend. He is still dribbling,
He will never find his shot.

*

Note: Another poem from the series “Markers,” a set of poems written on a train trip from Virginia to New England and back.

Coming to New England by Train [from Vanishing Tracks]

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Coming to New England by Train

The rocks are back, drifting just above
The earth’s surface like wildflowers along the tracks.

First a few outcroppings as if someone dropped rock seeds
By mistake, then wilder bunches of them, knee-high humps

Like micro mountain ranges. Soon they are shaping the landscape.
They are the engineers in charge, edging the banks heaving

To the tree line. They make walls but are not rocks with a mind
For mortar. They settle for nothing but themselves.

In Connecticut you see the first rocks on lawns,
In Rhode Island they are primary lawn ornaments

Bigger than the people who lived there. Clearly the house was designed
Around the rock. Wildflowers have been planted

At the foot of the rock. I know I am home because the clouds
Stick out of the sky like dry stones in calm blue water.

*

[Another poem from the sequence “Markers,” in which all the poems were written during a train trip from Virginia to New England and back.]

Running

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Running

When October’s morning glories trumpet our loss, you run.
When the day’s color concedes itself to leaves, you run.

When the earth rotates against you, you run harder.
When the earth changes its mind about you

and carries you along with it, you run faster.
When the skein of pain tightens across your thighs,

you run more. When our hands tell the time
in the dead hours where memory is sand,

you pull me from the bed and two hundred feet
below the earth by the gorge’s lasting stream we run.

When the moon flows like the reflection
it is, you run across the river of stars and your feet

do not splash against the night. Because the night
is as shallow as a puddle and you are as light

as the reflection of streetlights above you, and as still as you are
in the soul of my sleep, ahead of the curve of memory, you run.

Lines Stolen From a Private Letter Neither Fully Deleted Nor Fully Sent

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Lines Stolen From a Private Letter Neither Fully Deleted Nor Fully Sent

Selflessness can consume you, too.
We are birds signaling across a migration

started in different seasons. Insistent longing,
unsigned wind, eternity’s caution tape.

When my own name is a blur
to me, yours will be a bell.

Exposure

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Exposure

Perhaps I have shown too much.
Or left what matters out in the cold.

From a cold family in a cold state:
how did you tilt the seaons

so that notes slipped out of me
at your door? Words warmed me.

The world’s warnings like so much snow
covered all paths. I had to be exposed

to no direction to build a stillness
of ice, and sun, and time for your affection.

Autobiography of Yes

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Autobiography of Yes

Speak honestly with me — I am no decision.
I am an acknowledgment like a leaf landing

on the reflection of what it fell from acknowledges
it is not rejoining the tree but starting a new life

afloat on the agreeable other, unreflective,
its shape an utterance spreading out, unstoppable.

still

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still

What is hanging still there over the clouds and houses?
In this moment when even the crickets are pursing their lips.

I know the gravity of things keeps it all moving, that it takes
time for the light to reach me, I know on a soft quiet night

nothing is still but look up there, memory the size of the moon,
lighting the way, going nowhere, perfectly still.

Ohio Rain

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Ohio Rain

Sometimes in the same way Ohio rain meanders
below Akron and Canton casually beyond Caldwell and

into West Virginia stopping in Charleston for a change
of luck and then on slowly eastward and along sharp ridges

to this Valley becoming a fine mist on my shoulder as
only a memory catching its breath can before moving

on with the ease of a spoken sentence between strangers
about the weather, one on vacation, one on the way

to work but with a moment to spare in the passing mist
for the soft vowels of hello, so before the clearing wind

I feel what moves me also moves along this way, resting
when it reaches me like a mist on my shoulder,

like the lightest part of a vast weather that decides to stay
until evaporation pulls me up too and a new entirety moves on