Tag Archives: 8

November hymnal (11)

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November hymnal (11)

The bare trees reveal mountains unseen in summer.
Leaves scrape across the road like the words

Of unseen translators looking for an original
Language to give a new season to. I can almost see

This poem assembling as I compose it, rising
In a pile where the wind ebbs and only you,

With a scar on your chest where each word
Thin and twirling on its stem left your branching

Pulse after negotiating the passage between light
And life, only you would stop to read it, unseen

By the neighbors bending to their black bags and rakes,
Your bare shoulders glowing as sun breaks through.

November hymnal (9)

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November hymnal (9)

The clouds are grazing on the hills of morning light
Waiting for it to get colder so they can become tigers

And bite everyone. For now they are just the shadow
Of the swishing tail. November, stop pacing.

You can’t pull us apart like a vulture on the road.
You’re not October’s thrill of departure but a cooling

Afterthought. You don’t see the sharp gloom of the departed
Who themselves don’t know they’re gone. Who are us all

Each to our someone who’s forgotten us. I tell myself
That nothing lasts, but I remember the first time I heard

You laugh, a prowling like a new word that could
Swallow this season whole and leave footprints in the snow

Still yet to fall, like those flowers that bloom in February
Or the dry shadow of a paper delivered in the rain.

November hymnal (8) / for Doris

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November hymnal (8) / for Doris

Here in the dead center of autumn
Comes the voice on the phone.

I am outside of the house, outside
My father’s Explorer, on the side

Of a hilly street I call home. I was
Looking at the library across the lawn

Across the street when I heard the words
She was dead. Just then, as I stood

Inside nothing. And the past was past
Me, like a car on its way to the library

Traveling too fast on a neighborhood
Street past a standing man, nothing

More than a pellet of the present, on
a bleak night’s road beneath which the miles

Spin and the signs have gone dark.

November hymnal (5)

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November hymnal (5)

The leaves alight with morning rain fall
straight like skimming stones thrown

wrong    light as our names like our lives
they did not have too far to fall

On the morning air your soul floats
over the frost   newly alone    leaves

a scattered gritty rainbow reaching
for the one color it can’t contain

Blue soul blue sky blue frost
like all the memories of laughter

November hymnal (4)

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November hymnal (4)

On a cold November morning a man’s
Soul puts on his fifty year old body like a scar

Of his twenty year old’s dream of this morning.
The dream itself was a jacket that wouldn’t fit

Any future. The man steps under the maples
Across the street as the sun takes out its

Paintbrush; he chases leaves to the grass.
His children join him, stuffing their pockets

With color that will never go to ground.
With every stumble he gets younger.

With a gold and red season between his fingers
He takes off his jacket and leans

Like a bare tree against the sky.

November hymnal (3)

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November hymnal (3)

 

All the angles of the sun on tomorrow’s hours
will be awkward like when you arrive late

to a friendship that began before you
understood who your friends were

If you catch up then everything changes
the number of leaves on the autumn trees

the sun rose over that morning
or the hour of the note left on the door

that is still on the door of the heart
though it said nothing less fleeting

than any butterfly of fate
Tonight while you sleep an hour will

come back but from which night?
when you could count the moons

you’d loved together on a single hand
or to a life that has been waiting for you

but now is going on as if you had been there
all along? maybe it never needed you

like the moon never needed you walking
on it but walk on it we did

November hymnal (1)

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November hymnal (1)

Now is the blowing song of leaf lidded
lips lifted to the sky in the color that

knows love leaves. Now is the open
your books to page reach for me in

your dreams eyes. Now is the parting
from the family tree. Now the figure

eights of indeterminate holding,
Now golden combs in the air, now

the squirrel sprinting beneath the
carriage of wheels at the hour

That disappears and returns to
The hour before. That brings sun

Down at the third cup of coffee.

Summer’s last thunderstorm

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Summer’s last thunderstorm

Nineteenth of September, nearly supper.
First the trees start whispering questions.

Leaves swerve to ground like practice seasons.
Is nothing too green for grief, the trees ask.

The answer scrapes the top of the sky.
Bulldozer uprooting forever for the new estates.

Is it over? Almost. It’s almost over.
Then rain, soft, like em-dashes

Between invisible words, unspoken charters.
Whatever they are building up there

Has been redacted already in the unseen
Document of the future, what’s left

Of our uncomposed lives. Word on the tip
Of the tongue in a mouth that closes.

Like clouds closing on a patch of blue.
The thunder has forgotten its voice

Is summer’s, and throttles like a biker
Down a darkening road.

Altar of earth

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Altar of earth

Altar of earth, altar of the palm.
Rite of the nimble elbow–

God resides in the forearm,
Waiting like an owl.

In the lucid gloaming,
In the throttled air of hotels.

In the river of the quiet smile,
Which flows on, on in my

Mind. Like an actual river–
Always where I need to find it,

Never the same substance,
Always the same way.

Attitude, last day of August

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Attitude, last day of August

for Yehuda Amichai

We start to see summer like a tree we are driving by
As we turn from one street to another: a name changes

But what we are doing is the same. The blue spruce
On the corner flips the finger to the season:

It’s all digits and no fists, even its million middle fingers
Are made of more spiky blue fuck-all-of-its.

On the sidewalk the day feels strange,
It’s a day of everyone turning as if they were just stung

By something so small it couldn’t be swatted.
And the hurt look hiding the fear the nest is near.

Every morning the street wakes up and forgets
Everyone who has run over it before but if you walk here at night

You can hear the moans of everyone who could not turn back
Or forgot they ever came this way and don’t know

How they got here, honestly, and that sincerity is what
Seals them into the street’s surface. Regret is parked

On a side street, the windshield reflecting Mars, the gas station
“open” sign, streetlights on passing clouds.

It feels good to walk past all this and know no one
Is waiting at the edge of the dark street that is this line

And my pulse will roar on like so many late night
Truckers on I-81 squinting through exhaustion.