This windy September night the air’s as noisy as any
shallow stream
Beyond it the stars shimmer through time’s waves
Beyond them lies the unreachable
river bed
Beyond that if there is any bedrock to the soul
of the universe will I find you whole
again there
or will it be an imprint on an eon’s sediment
of what has passed
both of us
already becoming others in another time
*
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 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 is 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
Sometimes the present is the bird of prey: on the long morning highway towards work, I see half a mile ahead of me a steady migration of cars from the left lane to the right. This often happens when a driver becomes preoccupied with something other than driving; there’s an equation somewhere for this coefficient of attention and the resulting diminished pressure on the one’s acceleration across this moment of paved lane, and the next thing you know there are cars streaming by to the right, some drivers keeping their eyes straight ahead knowing that they are breaking road protocol by passing on the right, some pausing to stare at the offending driver before gunning past them. Because on a two-lane road winding through the foothills and with as many trucks as vultures settling on the occasional and equally inattentive deer, such behavior is considered rude and is answered in kind, namely by this stream of cars passing on the right while the offender is trapped in the wrong lane, unable to adjust their location to the speed they are going, while a long line of angry and virtually late commuters drifts by. Because to the one being passed, it’s not like someone going eighty miles an hour, it’s like people walking by you who are simply walking faster than you and have no idea why you are walking so slowly. It takes time to be passed when trapped in the left lane. This morning (though who knows what morning it will be when you read this, maybe one in which you have sped by someone yourself) I follow my basic rules of the road—never be the fastest or slowest on the road, never give the person behind you a chance to ruin your day, never do the same the person in front of you. From the left lane I stay in queue and glide into the right lane behind the car ahead of me, and pass this slow car like every other vehicle is doing. In that comfortable slipstream I glance back into my side rear-view and for just an instant see the distraught expression of the driver—she is old, she is driving a little over the speed limit, she is caught in this pocket of wrong lane by things happening too fast for her to keep up with, and by people who will not let her move over. She’s not doing anything wrong! All this I read in a half-second’s reflection through a windshield coated with morning sun’s glare. I feel like it is her mind that is glaring off the windshield, not the sun. It is blinding in its clarity. I want to take my foot off the pedal, let her pass me and take up a position back in the left lane, behind her car, to shield her from the assault of everyone trying to get to the future faster. Is this not the trip my own mother takes each day, alone in a vessel already traveling too fast but not fast enough to catch up to the past or avoid the future? But it’s too late, the driver in a pickup truck behind me is already pushing me forward, and the car behind him, so I tap on the pedal to speed up further, and when I look back again the windshield is dark in the diminishing image in my mirror. And I’m no mind-reader; I’m just another driver passing by, part of the unremitting assault of the present.
My mother shoos the fox from her grave
she is not ready for the sweeping day
the orioles nest far from this evening
above the red dust if only one would call
a silence the size of a tree
through the root’s center the river will come
just under the bark of time
something slowly moves the other way
In the blurring-by tree I saw the hawk turn its head.
This distance I’ve come to bring you home to find I no longer lived
In there. Well we walked arm in arm to the seats on the wall.
On the other side of the planet nobody called in.
Stood up by the upside down world. By the static sigh
Which could mean anything. By the eye which does not
Recognize. And this way back where the rocks weep ice
Is the only way which is forward
This brief response direct as a laugh because it was
Though you were unable to say my name or know
Who I was though you knew me through some tone or gesture
Is better than a memory of a laugh though the tunnel of grief is long
This goodbye where we are past the why to the final silent letter.
Translations from the English 