Vanishing Tracks (II)

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Vanishing Tracks (II)

What is resilient in us is resistant to memory
When the memory goes she will be some other self
Still resilient to the sailing light and shadow
And hungers and exhaustions of love
Made maybe even more immediate

When the resilience goes what is that then

When the resistance goes what is that

Just outside her heart she hears a sound in the night
I am out there knocking on the dusty porch
I have brought a friend with me
When she opens the door will she see herself
Holding my hand?

Do you remember when the car door opened up
As you drove and I hung out there clinging to it
Legs dangling and hollering your name?

Do you remember hollering my name
In encouragement
As you sat in the bleachers to watch
The smallest second baseman ever?

Do you remember the rides on rainy days to school
In the golden Rambler you called Goldilocks
Your children and their friends sitting forward
And backward like sardines to fit more of us into the back seat?

You spent so much time doing these things you have the right
Not to remember

Nothing can change what you have done
What it has made in me
I will remember these things
For you and when I can no longer remember
Nothing can change what you have done

Everything I can remember makes up only a small part of your life
The rest of it now becomes more you to me I see that now
You become your childhood your mother in that picture
Is you now as you look at it which is not
A bad thing as you tell me laughing
Your nephew becomes your father in that picture
Standing beside you younger than you somehow
It doesn’t matter
He has always stood beside you
From the moment he died when you were thirteen he was there
And you grew older as he remained a young father
I only understand now
how you see that picture

The mind’s tide’s becalmed
The beach endless
These memories now rise
Or settle
With little difference in depth
To the step of the moment that splashes

*

Vanishing Tracks (I)

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Vanishing Tracks (I)

On my journey home
the clouds obscure the one road up the mountain
like gods who long
since forgetting what they have made
come this way again
recognizing nothing

A hundred hazard lights blinking
of strangers slowing through that veil
could be seen from a distance
as some kind of worship

A half hour later
the clouds will be gone the road will not remember
they were ever here

On the mountain’s other side
I see them again
three heads on the sky’s coins
all looking away
and then again above the valley floor ahead of me
a tail of a giant sea creature twelve miles long
diving into the horizon

I can bear the gods forgetting all they have made
until they no longer exist
even in memory
and have made nothing
how much heavier though is your forgetting
because I know you
did what the gods could not

Still I will follow these vanishing tracks

*

Note: The three title poems from my 2011 book Vanishing Tracks, and another poem entitled “Sestina, with Christmas Lights,” were written in honor of my mother, who at the time of their composition had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s but was still living with my father. These poems, of course, are about memory, family, the sacred nature of motherhood, loss, and loss suffered across a family in a manner that is keenly unique but which impacts the rest of your life’s views on everything, from identity to suffering to love.

In a Dream [from Vanishing Tracks]

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In a Dream [from Vanishing Tracks]

In a dream I am in a car
racing backwards in slow motion
through a neighborhood being progressively
unbuilt, earth and foundation
appearing as shingles and windows fly away,
sod pulled up from red clay, native
shrubs waiting for the foundations to liquidize
and evaporate then moving back in,
and finally large rocks which we
never moved to make way for the houses
that were not built after all
and the road itself turns to gravel then dirt
undergrowth and pine needles rushing in,
and as the car itself begins to loosen
the sky darkens with shadows
coming towards me at the
speed of trees never cut down

*

[Another poem from from the series “Markers” and the book Vanishing Tracks.]

Bridgeport, CT [from Vanishing Tracks]

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Bridgeport, CT [from Vanishing Tracks]

On an empty court surrounded by empty lots
A man is dribbling a basketball. He stands
Around the three point line, jukes and feints
Away from an invisible defender, pulls up to
Shoot, changes his mind, dribbles again and
Steps to his left, maybe being doubled up
At this point though I can’t see anyone there,
And no one is around to see him pick up
His dribble yet again, no whistle blows, so he dances a
Little closer, the ball back over his head like a stone
In a medieval catapult. There is nothing between him
And the basket. He pauses, and dribbles again.
I crane my neck to watch him negotiate all that emptiness
As the train rounds a bend. He is still dribbling,
He will never find his shot.

*

Note: Another poem from the series “Markers,” a set of poems written on a train trip from Virginia to New England and back.

Coming to New England by Train [from Vanishing Tracks]

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Coming to New England by Train

The rocks are back, drifting just above
The earth’s surface like wildflowers along the tracks.

First a few outcroppings as if someone dropped rock seeds
By mistake, then wilder bunches of them, knee-high humps

Like micro mountain ranges. Soon they are shaping the landscape.
They are the engineers in charge, edging the banks heaving

To the tree line. They make walls but are not rocks with a mind
For mortar. They settle for nothing but themselves.

In Connecticut you see the first rocks on lawns,
In Rhode Island they are primary lawn ornaments

Bigger than the people who lived there. Clearly the house was designed
Around the rock. Wildflowers have been planted

At the foot of the rock. I know I am home because the clouds
Stick out of the sky like dry stones in calm blue water.

*

[Another poem from the sequence “Markers,” in which all the poems were written during a train trip from Virginia to New England and back.]

Paramount Stone [from Vanishing Tracks]

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Paramount Stone

The weeds cannot tell me anything new.
I let them cover up the old lies

And the shapes are something
I could not have told myself

About how I grew over the person
I told people I was and became something

*

[Dear readers, While I deal with a little writer’s cramp of the soul, I thought I would share with you some poems from my book Vanishing Tracks, which was published in 2011. The poems I share this week are from a section called “Markers: Notes on a train trip from Virginia to Cape Cod and back again” and all the poems in that section were written, at least in draft form, on the train there or back again. Many of these poems deal in some way or another with memory, with looking back while bring propelled forward, even if the propulsion is, in the strange ways of geography and family, toward the past. I’m purposefully releasing only a selection of them, and out of order, at that, if only because I’m going to let the mood of each day determine what to reach back for.]

About Time

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About Time

The mirror of time shows us only ourselves in the present.
There are no meters on the avenue of time. But when I parked

there a policeman immediately chalked my tire. It’s not like
you can stay here forever, he said, putting the small notebook

in his pocket. Would you want to know when he’d come back?
You could spend all day screwing in the light bulb of time.

Your eyes go bad just as the book of time is getting interesting.
The extra value meal of time is cold when you open the bag.

The middle school slow dance of time has the guitar solo
that you cannot figure out how to slow dance to.

The feral cat of time pees on the boxwoods outside.
There is a stuffed frog of time that I cannot locate

from the recent move. In the driving rain tonight
an owl exploded in front of my headlights

up from the dark road with a piece of something’s past
in its claws as it flapped backwards to avoid my car.

In my rearview mirror of the future I could see
we are all just creatures on the road.

It takes a long time to learn to play the piano.
Nobody plays the piano of time for just this reason.

Running

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Running

When October’s morning glories trumpet our loss, you run.
When the day’s color concedes itself to leaves, you run.

When the earth rotates against you, you run harder.
When the earth changes its mind about you

and carries you along with it, you run faster.
When the skein of pain tightens across your thighs,

you run more. When our hands tell the time
in the dead hours where memory is sand,

you pull me from the bed and two hundred feet
below the earth by the gorge’s lasting stream we run.

When the moon flows like the reflection
it is, you run across the river of stars and your feet

do not splash against the night. Because the night
is as shallow as a puddle and you are as light

as the reflection of streetlights above you, and as still as you are
in the soul of my sleep, ahead of the curve of memory, you run.

Lines Stolen From a Private Letter Neither Fully Deleted Nor Fully Sent

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Lines Stolen From a Private Letter Neither Fully Deleted Nor Fully Sent

Selflessness can consume you, too.
We are birds signaling across a migration

started in different seasons. Insistent longing,
unsigned wind, eternity’s caution tape.

When my own name is a blur
to me, yours will be a bell.

Fortune teller

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Fortune teller

fortuneteller (2)

An old paper trick. My daughter’s voice counting
as her thumbs and forefingers shift the shape

to reveal triangles within triangles, like the smallest
possible stable shape of a thought, a fate. Choosing from the images

or words drawn on each one, I go with “Gold.” Shuffle. “Pine tree.”
Shuffle. “Two inseparable dots.” At each choice the landscape

changes again beyond choice. Under the last shape
is the final stable thing, the fortune: An old dream

will come back to you. Almost invisible, that dream
beneath colors and trees, underpinning everything.