All the space
I do not feel like I am falling apart
I feel like I am more aware than ever
of all the space between
the tiny things that are my life
All the space
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Category Archives: Poetry
Night song
Night song
Your god is the back of a bluebird
Song of the inside of night’s clear lid
Your god is the thing before it’s seen
Color of waking from the dream
With an image cooling like lava
Into the shape of an empty hand
as full of air as the starling’s wing
Yet solid as the slow shore of dying
Your faith the driftwood to which I cling
Established proof of land if not direction
Broken map of the edge of each breath
And the way back to morning
*
Note: Last night my wife Mary was preparing for her first Sunday as a eucharistic minister, Pentecost Sunday being a fitting time to start such a journey. As someone who has long ago abandoned any sort of communal religious ritual, I nevertheless find that many of my closest friends are those that undertake spiritual paths whose directions seem authentic to me in a way I can’t quite register but can feel. This poem was a nod of respect and admiration for how others’ faiths often keep me afloat.
The Draw
The Draw
Almost solvable riddle of woods.
We are rooted in the underword.
Absence the untitled chapter.
The drawer of memory creaks
In its not quite closed position
Warped by incremental tears.
An empty house draws me
Dug into a soft hill of oak and arrowhead.
Crows zoning over the tree canopy
Level with the loft room windows
And my mother’s abandoned dresses.
Send a sand dune home.
The Mays
The Mays
I walked in the scattering
shadows beneath scrub
oak those Mays each step
Compacting years whose
Deaths I’d not earned
Such leverage from
Toward wild blueberries
And the cairns of earth
Behind the drive-in past
Hokum Rock Road and
Its eponymous stone dropped
By god or glacier– if names
Went the other way I didn’t
Care — if the stone dropped
The god and abandoned
There it turned to stone it
Hardly mattered — all the Mays
Sweetened to summers
The water warmed in the bay
And at the drive-in the boundaries
Of story cut corners of moonlight
Now decades later and deaths
Cantilevered one on the other
And anticipating the next step
After messages passed while
Thunder flexed against the rainless
Night comes a quiet whisper
In the trees reminding me
Of rumors in the scrub oak dark
The unvisited stone cracked
Down the middle a gap a child
Of a dozen Mays could leap
Squinting like a dimming eye
That’s earned all it’s seen
Rock before names eyes before
The warming waters
May’s riot
May’s riot
The sun was a mirror with an image of you
Painting a picture of the sun which was my eye.
The turtle like a moon sliding beneath a horizon
Of lilypad, the day’s thin layer skimming aside
For memory’s bulk to submerge
To the murky safety of living matter.
The slaughter of peonies behaved as you passed
Then carried on with May’s riot
The green volume
The green volume
April is soft green and spiders.
The wind has its green voice back,
Alphabet of letters all looking alike
And green gravediggers burying
The brown memories
Before they can be missed.
Flowers set upon each other
Like dogs or wolves we’ve not seen
Since first in love we glimpsed
A world to taste and tear apart.
Meanwhile in yet to happen May
All green darkens like a banker’s visor
As sun slants beyond a high Wednesday
Afternoon window. Counting coin for June.
The other May’s the underside of maple,
Adding dimension, staying light, twisting
Minutes, filling the green volume.
First hour of Good Friday
First hour of Good Friday
Stained glass star, muted by night.
The magic has been done and waits
In a simple ceramic container,
In a tall cloaked pitcher alongside
A white, unevenly melting candle as
Wide as my palm in the dark church.
The structure is still settling, plank
By plank, in every pew or overhanging
Arch, like we’re inside the ribs of a beast
Deep underwater. Under pressure that
Would kill us if we faced it alone.
Only us and the waiting god
Who’s asked us to stay awake. To sit awake
While time wears the faces off all witness.
Dimmed lights crouch into the ceiling,
Emitting the hum of unreachable space.
Guest from the past, ghost from the future
Guest from the past, ghost from the future
Here inside my body is a table for all time.
From some place in the future my ghost arrives,
Disoriented, not remembering how or when
I died but carrying a newspaper that sat
On the grass throughout the night I expired,
Saturated with dew or rain, does it matter,
And now all the words are gathered so close
from both sides of all pages, the odd and the even,
they form a single unreadable sentence.
There are no chairs around the table because
Ghosts don’t need chairs and the guest
From the past is not welcome anyway. He will be here
Any moment, even though I lied about when
Things would start, that’s how early he always is,
The past is never late. I invite him hoping my ghost
Will scare him, make him understand his end
Is inevitable. But of course he can’t change.
I end up scaring myself, my coffee goes cold.
By the time the news is dry it’s not worth reading.
This is the best table I could imagine, too, all wood,
Like the big table where Melville wrote Moby Dick
In the middle of the room on the second floor
Of a landlocked house with a view of Mt Greylock.
I can hear the turtle in the alarm flexing his muscle
And the morning air rushing in. Everything
Will be the same next time I visit, except me.
The storm that was a pause between things
The storm that was a pause between things
Unmoving white sky, after two hours of sleep.
Like a view for the morning after you die:
No color, no sound. Only the rhythm of dogs
Breathing at the foot of the bed, those animals
To whom death, like life, is just passing weather.
The snow has fallen or is yet to fall but is not falling.
Two ages like thick glass tectonic plates
Clasped me as they passed against each other.
One an age in which I existed, the other
Where I was absent. I could not see
the difference. So little would change,
So little that had to happen for the morning
To come no matter what. That is when
The dogs left me. We are not alone in death
But we are alone in despair. Numbness coming
In from the arms and legs toward the heart.
The brain a battering ram turned inwards.
Then I slept. So many things we can’t control
That happen anyway. The memory of deer
in the backyard the dawn before. The deer
Themselves. The paths that brought them
To nibble at a birdfeeder the day before a storm.
Snow moon
Snow moon
Not the owl whose short questions are strung
On this line of dark hours like rosary beads.
Not the cloud’s cold eyelid closing over
The near-empty parking lot in each of our minds.
What drove you there and what were you trying
To buy on such a night when the moon arcs away
Like the last snowball you threw at a friend
You outgrew without knowing? They both faded,
They both landed somewhere beyond sight.
Not the short-tempered ladder to memory.
The night’s too wide to haunt. But for a few
Moments, it opened its eye to look at you
And swept across your life without noticing:
Who you missed, who you hit, how cold
Your hands were when it took shape.
And an idea drifted down un-owned
And clung to you like frost, an owl flown,
A string of prayers creased by doubt.
Translations from the English 