The soul embarks on its journey.
Nobody is there to wave it goodbye
Or wish it safe passage. Yet it looks back.
The soul feels it is traveling in circles.
The passage is both long and short
Because it is the soul that is growing,
Not the journey,
Blossoming outward like a sphere
Where for the outermost edge the journey
Is the longest and only gets longer
Until looking back it sees itself
Waiting for its arrival at the beginning.
Who is that standing by you, laughing?
In the neighbor’s security spotlight, activated by my foraging,
The rain is turning to snow. No longer just the path of a motion
But the substance of a season. No longer a man in the dark
Putting out trash but, striding through the door, carrier
Of a million fragile messages of light, change, gravity.
With eyes closed I can hear you smile.
Your voice a place I know my way around.
Woodpeckers say goodnight the strangest way
And other birds of winter appear as singular
Leaves of gray, blue, gold on the trees
We can only see through their nakedness.
I drop your eyelids’ map of dreams:
Everything you are I still don’t know
Runs through my veins
Like the flight patterns of birds
that never have to know the route
Mid-week in late October:
a New England apology.
Like the bird thought extinct
Seen pecking a mailbox post
It gives away nothing
But the ability to go on.
They have argued before: now heart
And mind walk hand in hand,
In the skunkworks of autumn,
Where the moon’s rise and fall
Is one heartbeat charted
On the night’s sheet.
It moves with such patience
We almost think our dreams
And our days are walking with us
And not staring as we pass by.
People will be watching.
Be careful how you love —
It may cause an unsafe drop in
Side effects. A special election
Edition that will last right up
Until we are all dead and
Changing the subject.
(That never happened.)
Outside the polling place
Of the soul they stand,
The watchers. The monitors
Who do not believe in us,
We are so invisible to them
We can walk past them.
Their eyelids only snap open
When they hear the hand
On the lever.
We wait for the storm to turn its back.
Lay down early, moon, behind the trees
And mountains; we see the eyes
Of our loved ones, and do not want you to look.
Every wind is coming from the past. It began earlier
And it may enliven even the browned-out ground level
Settling of the sycamore’s spring, its old news
Swirling at my ankles at the edge of the library lot.
What did I forget to return? What crisp regret?
The dark thought is just ahead
Like a porch off the kitchen,
The door held open
By a painted rock. But the sliding
Glass doors beyond are locked and weather-
Taped shut. I take the dogs outside
Before bed and the sudden quiet
Of crickets as we round the corner
Is like the dark thought. The dull
Glow of the last light bulb going out
Is not the dark thought though
I think it is. It’s like the rocking chair
Which I know I can avoid but
Walk into because my eyes
Are still smarting from the light
Bulb’s ghost, fading memory
Of light, which I turn to curse
And see only the pitch black air:
The solid darkness and lack of
Location: the nothing to grasp:
That’s the dark thought.
[Note: My son August, 9, wrote this poem on a sick day last week.]
The shadow
among us searches
for inner
love only
to get bitter
coldness and
despair for it grasps
love fear hate
and sadness
but only to
find it has
betrayed itself
within.
Translations from the English 