Hands in pockets of an old jacket,
On a tree-bent sideroad to pick up
Sunday paper: Breaking: the moon behind
my shoulder and the sun ahead of me, over
Opposite horizons: who’s to say what
Is rising and what is falling: certainly not,
On this last morning of the worst year I’ve
Survived, the Sunday Washington Post.
All things irrevocable, every year, every hour.
All appeal a grovel that takes another minute down,
Another day, another dawn.
All regret of miniscule assistance.
The leaves on all the trees still green.
In the harbor of the early evening sky
They all sing the same song
And we listen without hearing
And the song bears no resistance.
Time, relentless wind. Awake this winter night
I hear its empty roar, filled with angry nothing
Passing on its way to nothing beyond the ice
On our window pane. When the sun rises
The ice may last a day or two, that’s how cold
The wind has made us, but it’ll melt when we’re
Not looking, like it was never there, like we
Won’t be someday. My hand is on your hip.
Our bodies’ warmth a single thing I won’t
remember when I’m dead, so I’ll remember
Now, unless our minds are like the wind
And carry some fragment from our time
Together, dislodged from this world and
Blown to the next, together, or empty,
Or empty, together, no memory but the thing
Itself, afloat and away, that’s the both of us.
—for Mary, 12/24/22
My first book since 2018’s Wind Intervals is now available.
Order a signed copy below!
A few of these poems have appeared in recent issues of Beloit Poetry Journal and New Letters. I’m grateful to the editors for their interest in my work.
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In the house my parents built. These mirrors have seen my face,
my naked body, for longer than any living thing: at twelve, sunburned
And skinny and flush with summer friendships from the beach;
at twenty-three, back from graduate school with the young writer
who’d become my wife, tired after walking ten miles from Hyannis
to Dennis to surprise my parents with a visit from Boston.
And now at fifty-six. Watching our three teenagers watch the sun
Set from the Cape’s highest point, stone tower a stone’s throw
From this house. O age inexorable and gentle has given me
A face weathered with seasons of gratitude. In this bathroom mirror is
An image of each time I’ve stood before it, in the same place,
Dripping wet, a little transparent, my selves seeing uneasily through each other’s
particular reflections. It took every second to get us all here.
No wonder the image wavers.
Outside and a mile away through scrub oak and sand the bay
glints with day’s embers, the slow ticking away of light
dropping through the horizon’s grate and the oncoming
Rolling rememberlessness of night, the countless
Reflections no one will see
We never went to your father’s river
though far north of here we stood
on a jetty at the end of a normal day
while my mother took pictures of the sky.
Heartbreak is heartbreak at any age:
always too big to fit into a single person.
Pick any shell off this Cape Cod beach
and listen: the sound goes on forever although
every shell’s message is short: “I’m alive
and well” though it always arrives a lifetime
too late or should we assume the life is ours?
Sunset was so big, like a normal day’s sunset
with a bonus sunset for tourists, my mother
had to take another picture and another.
Still the sky wouldn’t fit. And in every photo
you and I stood among strangers like every
group that gathers by happenstance along water
and each held a shell and my mother took
their picture and wrote their names in a notebook
I found years later far from her photographs
and she told them how I laughed so heartily
as an infant people would interrupt my naps
just to watch me wake up and laugh and it
found its way into their heads so that even when
it left a memory had formed around it like a shell
and it was their own laughter saying I’m alive
and well and I wish you all well without your names
in my mother’s pictures with my father at her side
In the stressed syllable of the last month
sometimes I wake in the middle of the night
in the unstressed syllable of the third hour
and feel my heart moving around inside me
as if it is trying to escape when I am
not looking but where would it go?
It’s too early for the scrabble of starling
in the gutter above the open window
The cold air comes in, musical notes
the size of pillows. Like I haven’t
figured out how to dream yet
a window trying to be a wall
What magic changed glass into night?
Then today as the moon rose just after
sunset I found myself in a clearing
mind, thoughts scattered into the thicket beyond.
My heart circles slowly at the edge of the light.
I trust the trees like it trusts the trees.
Like a large cat it shrugs its shoulders
as it walks, like it’s forgetting to take
responsibility for anything like with each step
it’s a step further from what it’s done
Its fur glows at the edge of the circle of light
maybe waiting for me to turn my head
or for another like it to show up at the edge
then from the outside it will come for me
Where the light falls may fail
something else along its edge
close enough to see it
but not be in it or of it
Sun streams through stained
glass but not to the people inside
under the shadows each of
their individual Gods
My bench in the shade got cold
but all I had to do was walk
a few steps past the walnut tree’s
highest eminence now just
shifting sparkle and shadow
at my feet — even on the ground
I’m higher than spires
my limbs bound to no rooted
trunk of belief — I know
I’ll float freely one day
but I’ll fall like we all fall
and the landing I have seen
against living’s gravity
is almost weightless
By this river
My river starts as a creek that idles like a train loading up kids at a park
then slides underground, quickening beneath the destroyed black neighborhood
beneath the cheap hotel and its parking lot that was supposed to be a mall
and on downhill past City Hall where it bursts into the open thirty feet below
the police station parking garage then sidles back under the concrete
and into the dark again beneath a parking lot called The Wharf though
it hid the only waterway in the valley so sometimes when I want
to touch the current of my life I feel a parking space stripe that
hand-wide line white or yellow painted over and over for years
until it’s a physical presence not just a visual guide the layers
of paint countable like tree rings when what I want is the rush
and gurgle of what’s just below our pedestrian lives
A thousand miles up and over
a rough-hewn stone sits atop
the bodies of my parents
A smooth space on the side
for a name that will mean
Nothing to anyone in time
On this their anniversary
beside each other for
the first time in almost
a decade the rain has fallen
As if they planned this day
when they picked that stone
with the rough divot they hoped
would collect rain for the birds
Translations from the English 