Here’s grief again–summoned by absence
it comes and even when absence flies it stays
taking the shape of the tree nothing is perched on
later this shape appears everywhere
without warning in full form as if it had been there
growing for years and years and we only
now just saw it—how did it grow so big
rooted so deeply in the middle of the road?
I sit at the bottom of a shallow sea.
Above the surface, the old mountains are all wavy,
leaning down. They are stooped and as patient
as the deserts of wizened lizards they will become.
The new one, the one I will drive over to work
the one on which I will see the maple’s early change
the one on which I will see the brown bear’s lazy gaze
the one on which I will stand with my aging father
has still not taken its first tectonic steps.
It’s not even the apple in extruding lava’s eye,
yet by the time I am old enough
to put on these eyeglasses
it will already be ten-times diminished
from its highest peak. I miss this part as
A big thing blocks out the yellow white sun above me
and swallows an ancestor or two.
When it is gone only the Star River shows the flow.
When the uninvited hand grasps your wrist
no matter how softly
something good is not coming
with that other hand
I know these petals unless pressed
in your own life’s book will not survive
and even then as a shadow of love’s shape
or unless adrift in your river’s endless flow
come to outline any eddy worth circling
and even then could gutter off a bank or
regret’s cold stone where air
tears at life’s evaporating edge
or unless emblazoned with wing
of robes softly opening to heat and
even then burn only as a blindfolded
assurance of need, need:
or unless left alone a becoming
drifts around it, swirls it down just so
like snow a mile up lands finely
at the foot of the sky
Even below freezing, the slight snow
melts under sun to show hard ground
But behind the tree trunk’s bulk it stays
whitish, slow-blurring across the day’s drift
Near the top of the mountain
Across the grief of February’s empty arms
A single maple bursts into red buds.
*
The tree is not predicting spring, I note
And though alone, as I am, driving past,
Is not a symbol of courage, or a prophet, as I think I’d like.
It’s a being of air and earth, maybe keener
Than its cohorts at sensing a change in soil
Or air enabling itself to change
Into its next self. In the morning
I hear the birds it cannot hear that tell me things
Are on their way to April. I have my own cues
To draw from me the things I grow.
But that can’t be all: the Anglo-Saxon maple harp,
Excavated from a barrow in Berkshire,
Still struck an open chord
Across the dirt of centuries.
The maple love spoons carved by Welsh
Ancestors hang on the thrift store wall
And can still be recognized for what they are:
A domestic object wrought with
A passion undomestic and ornate. The maple
Is durable for carving and can hold personal feelings
Far longer than the body can. Long after grief
Has run its course and the forces of air and earth
Have consumed us back into the world of unerring matter
And our family trees severed from this single point
Of meeting. Maybe that’s why this maple means
What it means to me, alone and driving by.
from the collection The Artificial Horizon
On a night of grief
light snow stings like glass: your eyes
search these fallen stars
The garden is in the recluse, not the other way around.
You rivers and mountains pale against the heights and gorges
She must climb. I am the hand in her mind where thought gets tough.
I am the step suddenly appearing. In the calm harvest fields I know
I have often been missing, off on the mountain’s other side.
But in the slow running river my boat is not far away,
she’ll call a breeze to fetch me faster than words paddle. Here in her
garden, I’ll meet the better me, nodding as I pass on my way to her.
I crack the window, listen:
What message can this cold wind carry
but this breeze won’t tilt my room’s way and come in
I reach out it slips through my fingers
Unkind even to the moon it has taken a little off the top
Diminished month sent howling through the pines
Unauthored, not meant to be read –
or merely hurrying by, a forgotten promise?
There is no shape of the tree
though we identify the tree by its shape
what I see in trees and steel sky
is patience and distance
If river ice or puddle ice breaks
under the weight of the waning moon
what we’ll find beneath is the waning moon
can I love you any more fully beneath this sheath of being?
Translations from the English 