For the Sudden Mourners
that thing you hold is
no less real for his death that
thing that I hold is no less
real for the distance
For the Sudden Mourners
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Category Archives: The Drift
Poem To Be Read But Once
Poem To Be Read But Once
As soon as I have finished reading this poem
to you, you will begin forgetting it.
I have written it many times
but it can be read only once.
You are thinking if you read it
and I read it then that is more
Than once only but those
are different poems. This one
Is for you alone. Take a moment
to enjoy being in the middle of it.
I will even skip a line for you to take it all in:
And when you have read it the words
will fall away almost
immediately though the poem never
will nor old love and what travels with it
the line you’ll never forget
after all will be the one I skipped for you
Dream of Finishing Something
Dream of Finishing Something
For the first time you see the rough draft of your life
complete. You now know—it’s a whale; it’s a shark;
It’s a school of fish. Silt in a tidal pool.
It’s a shadow of the plane passing overhead,
of the cloud into which the plane disappears.
For a moment there is no telling which direction
it is going, but it is all there; or whether its depth
Is imagined but it is all there is. Imagined or not.
Puny Lament
Puny Lament
Haven’t seen the moon
for a week. Are you there with
me, beyond all cloud?
Early Summer, Cape Cod
Early Summer, Cape Cod
To the world we go, extinguishing and compelled.
Early summer evening. Through a knot of fireflies
A few stars showing. To the world
an evening of fireflies and an epoch of stars
are the same, just what I see, no difference.
I will remember this firefly and this evening
as they travel at light’s speed into a past
beyond existence at the same speed a star’s memory
travels into the future to meet this evening,
this view. To the world depth starts to go
its own way towards deterioration and someone
determines it’s time to start counting the stars.
Scargo Tower, Looking West
Scargo Tower, Looking West
On the east coast by the bay at the top
of a hill overlooking a lake filled they say
when a great whale thrown by a winter storm
crashed there or filled they say by the tears
of a young woman from the Scargo tribe
when it was clear her life would not be the same
and over the belt of a waist-high stone wall at the top
of a tower there though you are looking west
with me the width of a continent is a thread across
the horizon and above it the sun lowers itself
ablaze on the bay before it and again on the lake
of tears or it is the resigned eye of the whale still
lying there its shape waiting for the tide to bring it
back I have seen the sun set over two bodies
of water the strip of land scrub oak and pine between them
wider than the continent beyond a hundred times
from here I have seen the riotous light lean against clouds
knowing my home was here above the crown
of the highest tree I’ve chatted with tourists taken pictures
for them stood here long after they have left
felt the wind rush in over the trees gathering stones
when it was clear my life would not be the same
and now I am coming back again to this stone place
where looking over endless land you see nothing
but water and sky and the wide scrim
of a welcoming light that does not remember me
Six Thirteen Fourteen
Six Thirteen Fourteen (Honey Moon)
The sagging bottom of the sky tears on the mountain
and the gray spilling down ten miles away eventually
obscures the entire ridgeline. I’m out here to see the first
full moon rising on a Friday the thirteenth in June
in a hundred years, and now the horizon is missing.
In the highest branches of the old walnut tree
the leaves are flinging the last rays of sun away
with such chaotic gusto I can’t tell where the wind
is coming from. Closer to the ground the silver maple
holds its leaves out completely level, motionless
as if confirming that, somewhere, here for
the moment anyway, all is calm. The mist arrives
on slender legs ten minutes later, apologetically calm
and thinning the distance: the mountains have moved closer
like how a memory of someone far away suddenly appears
as a thing you want to climb, or a barrier on the path.
And still there is no moon. In bed before midnight
I feel a sudden rush of love for you
as if I myself had just broken through life’s haze,
glowing and spherical, irreducible, reaching without
fail. While the most I see out my window later
is a wedge of pure light through the shifting clouds
I will remember that moon and who I was suddenly,
how love shone off me from light’s source.
Rained Out
Rained Out
I never swore I would not write a softball poem!
Darkness strides down the high hill towards the field.
Taking its time so the mist beneath it can depend
like a hanging plant, motionless every time you look.
I turn away to watch the game but something taps my shoulder–
the first drops of rain. People are running for their cars
With their softball gloves on their heads. Though it lasts
only five minutes, the rain turns the red clay infield
Into a giant thumb print of the storm. The umpire
examines it like a tired detective then calls it a night.
Unaffected as true fans, the bluebirds whir and swerve
across the outfield, shagging flies.
Driftwood Days
Driftwood Days
The sea has examined me into this shape
I have come so far only because of what is left
How can I not accept it gratefully how can you not
if the entire sea can do it I would say give it a try
I do not have the power to observe you into love
but something of us both has been examined
Wave by wave into a lean slightness no vessel
because it goes all directions at once having come so far
with its hollows and whorls soothing to the waves
no difference between inside and outside
It no longer matters what is missing it never did it turns
out it was always this floating thing and never that
Evening Sky
Liz Doyle
Evening Sky
from a painting by Liz Doyle and a photo by Ann KoplowNight had already begun to hug the lowlands
when his back to the pale faces of the outbuildings
their remnant glow against the forgetting day
I thought I saw Turner out there
tying himself to a piece of sky shadow
to ride out the violent vault into night
A mile up the day was still swirling
like love thundering in the chest well after
the details have been lost still Turner
tearing clouds with his brush into the idea
of clouds wonders if he’s leaving
something out he’s never believed
the details mattered although they meant
all the moment could form into and change
From the cumulonimbus he sees an old man
preparing a thatch hut against the wind
And a town lobbing light into the sky
The man’s thoughts are fireworks reflected
In the village fountain and to Turner who feels
the clouds free him who feels he let go first
the fireworks in the fountain some times
are clearer than the fireworks in the sky
Ann Koplow
Translations from the English 