Category Archives: Poetry

The Instructions

5 Replies

IMG_1144

The Instructions

You unfolded the instructions like a bedsheet
And smoothed out the words with your palm.

First we identify all the parts, you said
To find the thing that’s missing. Or things.

It’s hardly ever just one thing.
The tools in the instructions, you pointed out,

We’d never seen before. Might have to make
Them out of scraps of other things we have.

Eventually that toolbox will have everything you need
but for now we just need a level and some sandpaper

So you can sand this grief to a shape that fits
the frame. Of what, I said. You read from the

Instructions: of that gap you fear so much.
If you look in that envelope included in the box

You’ll find the hinges of your life. You helped
Me sand and sand and mount the door

So oddly shaped and hear the bolt slide smooth
Like a finger through a ring.You folded the instructions

So the last line was all that showed and placed it
On my palm. What’s left, I said, the door is built.

You take your time, you said, and then walk through.

Creek, Cloud, Cricket

6 Replies

IMG_0554

Creek, Cloud, Cricket

I drove ten hours toward the gravity of mountains
Away from the withdrawing bay and on the other side

of the Cape the sea’s constant worry-beads whirled
In the many-fingered tide. I was home and a long way

From it. I was twenty trash bags tightened one at a time
With old things, stuffed with the past in a dark garage.

I was inert explosive. I was upright. My father’s lips
And eyelids affixed shut, his hands folded, all horizon.

Modest shadow details of sunset on a strange beach.
I was home and alongside the creek I was alongside

When my father spelled out the last word he said to me:
“Yes.” The creekbed’s brushed knuckles just below

The surface of running thought, watered down mountain
wisdom. Summer drifted like a jellyfish. A creekbed

Mumbling yes endlessly. A cloud over a hospital wing.
Ritual shawl over a casket. Spell it out slowly.

Dread lifts lightly like an August wasp. It has its own
Direction and settles according to unseen rules

Of behavior written in the humid afternoon air.
Eventually, after rain, crickets give the all-clear:

It’s too dark to tell if I’m happy or sad. If grieving
Is the rocks or the water, the cloud or the rain,

The pinpoint crickets or the spinning earth.

Night on Cape Cod

3 Replies

IMG_0745

Night on Cape Cod

Sister, the song keeps restarting
And each time it is a different song

With its insistence that nothing starts again
Not fathers or mothers or families

But the sunset our grandfather painted
Stays just where it always has

We believe the promise of wind on sand dunes
Surf on a tumbling shell

The house we grew our souls in
Where we pulled our mother’s memories

Out of albums photo by photo
To find the wrong name on the back

Or a name we didn’t know
None of our souls can outgrow

That house
The wind comes through the upstairs

Window like the house is breathing in
Before starting a song

Vigil (1)

Leave a reply

IMG_0771

Vigil

1.

I can take a nap any time of day.
Five minutes at my desk. Ten

At the dining room table. Longer
In an uncomfortable wooden rocker.

My kids see it all the time, like
Clockwork; their father’s momentary

Ease. I didn’t see my father sleeping
Until last week after a long day

Of transfusions and transport,
He was asleep to the sounds of

Baseball on TV when I got
To his room and sat quietly by.

All the years of my life to see
His hands, his face, alive, at rest.

Enough

4 Replies

IMG_0503

Enough

Time between the tides.
Horseshoe crabs guard

The low tide, bury themselves
Beneath the sand ripples,

worry lines on the sleeping
god’s forehead.

*

The thought comes to the edge
Gently, again and again. You pile

Rocks to keep it at bay. It’s not
The thought that will drown you.

The rocks glisten in the sunset
Where the thought caresses them.

*

Even tears big as jetty stones
Disappear into the thought.

It’s enough, you think, to know
If you just lay on your back, relax,

The thought will support you,
Hold you to the sky like an offering.

Before grieving

6 Replies

IMG_0730

Before grieving

I could hear but heard the past most clearly, the voices in the moment
Warped like waves at a puddle’s edge bouncing backward

I could move but was walking ahead of myself, my feet traveling
over a landscape I could not feel beneath me

I could see but saw only context, I could smell but smelled only
The rainy earth of medicine

I felt time pass but my fear was a half-second quicker
than my certainty though they walked with the same shadow

I understood but like understanding a letter written to someone else
Or a message that once understood cannot be answered

I remembered but I remembered like a book where I’d underlined
every word leaving me with all significance and no sense of direction

I could tell the dying his own death story but in the telling fell
Out of my own life a stranger holding his father’s hand

July afternoons

2 Replies

IMG_0418

July afternoons

1.

God stays happy by not holding
Onto heavy thoughts.

Thirty minutes into snarled traffic on I-81.
Twenty feet above us. One white egret.

A flag across the dark gray sky.

2.

A dozen swallows scry the squeezed space
Between roof and rain clouds.

Later, we walked up the street
To see fireworks rise, explode,

Penetrate into clouds which shimmered
For a moment like they’d been told

A secret they weren’t ready to tell.

3.

The lightning shot through the house
Like the bead on the line on the monitor

Of a flatlining patient. In through the back porch’s
Sliding glass window and out the glass front door.

A moment later the house shook with sound,
Twice, as if God had a sudden thought

Too heavy to hold onto, then another.

Leave a reply

9EB4A247-3BA5-4B5A-B477-2C1A8229A6F8

At a parent’s wake, November 2017

You arrive, as at the unfamiliar railroad station

Through which your own memories pass
As the luggage of real people, familiar but

Changed by all the time they have spent
Away from you. Sometimes one of the people

Will reach into their backpack and bring out
Their own memory of your parent, showing

Something you have never known. Then,
As real people do, they leave the station for connections

That will take them to their own lives again.
Your line does not move. Outside, swallows,

Those early summer infidels, bank with reckless
Accuracy against the momentum of all the invisible

Forgotten things.

Diagnosis [series of dreams 2]

10 Replies

When somebody’s wearing a mask, he’s gonna tell you the truth.
When he’s not wearing a mask, it’s highly unlikely.
-Dylan

Strike through the mask.
-Melville

Image

Diagnosis [Series of dreams 2]

For years I tried on my father’s face but it never fit.
I did not know how many faces I had left when the word

Found its way through the eye holes
And I saw the future blink back

As if it were the one surprised, as if
It were anything more than the grit of time

In a tear. My mother had vision, my dad had clarity
Like a pair of glasses you forget is there

Because to see the thing that made it clear
You’d have to give back what felt like yours

All along. Seven years after she left
The surface of the world my mother died,

The one who’d told me the only time she saw
Her husband cry was when his father lay

Caved in by cancer, his last breath as much
A mystery to the five year old me as the giant sycamore tree

In our front yard, so big I could never see
It all at once, no matter how far away I got.

No one would see it complete in my eyes. My dying father’s face
Looks at me in the mirror, giving away nothing.

When I go see him this last time before
His brittle blood flags I know he’ll show me

Nothing different. I’ll ask him about mom and
When he pauses not looking I’ll switch faces and he’ll

Never know what I gave him, this quiet gratitude,
This empty mask I’ve been preparing for years.

 

 

mask by Stephen Schwaner

Skylark [series of dreams 1]

4 Replies

Life isn’t about finding yourself, or finding anything.
Life is about creating yourself, and creating things.
-Dylan

IMG_0105

Skylark / series of dreams 1

O spirit I never wanted to catch you
And you never wanted to be caught

Like the small owl my son and I found
In my father’s garage in last night’s

Dream the door open like a diagnosis
The strange bird looking out at us

Sitting on an old office chair
We rolled it out into the driveway

Where I spent so many hours
Playing basketball and one new

Year’s eve climbed the pole and stepped
Over to the garage roof and watched

The new year’s silent entrance the sky
Unchanged for my gratitude and unchanged

To this day I can still remember it the steel
Cold dark the pinholes of stars the blinding

Emptiness overflowing the horizon
Inside the muffled whoops and in the lowlands

Of the suburbs assorted firecrackers snapped
Like small minds and while i remember that step

From the pole of childhood to the roof of my second
Decade I still do not remember

Ever coming back down and below there in the dream
Through the open garage door the owl

Flew with a silent explosion of motion
Across the street and then came back