Home of the cardinals.
The train sound twins as it passes through
Echoing off unresponsive brick and glass
Over the darkening grass. It’s like there are two
Trains, the past casting an echo of the future
And then it’s gone, both of them
And still no moon.
The maples are still green. I can hear the Canada geese
Sloughing below vision. Noisy in the west, where clouds break
Against the invisible shoreline of the livable world.
Their calls drift east, first in a foam of chaos then spreading
Like a wave disperses, one voice eddying out, diminishing
Then rising again, with a single repeated wish, good luck, good luck.
3.
The mist climbs down the edges of the soccer field.
We are surrounded: on one side a power substation
With towers, cables and wires stretching out in all directions
Dwarfing the abandoned factory on Commerce with the smokestack
That looks like someone stubbed a giant cigar
Into the earth, back when people were giants;
On the other side a massive mostly empty school for the deaf
And blind trying to figure out what to become in
A new century where you don’t isolate children.
The mist is rolling, from the corners of the field
Toward the pre-teen daughters in their blue and red
Pinnies focused on the soccer scrimmage.
My daughter is out there, growing taller and stronger
And more invisible with each passing minute.
Coaches are like a good timepiece made in another
Country, they don’t stop for anything. Not even for
Parents whose daughters are disappearing before
Their eyes, straining to identify a joyful yell for the ball
As it skids over the wet blades into the future,
beyond the taut lines of current and the brooding brick
and the skeletal structures of power behind them, looming.
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
2.
Each time I clear the fence of another day
I am trespassing onto the future’s yard
Like the deer behind the house
alarmed to find open space by the trees leaping
fence after fence and just as quickly gone
[4.14.15]
Late afternoon. The hills behind me
obscure the sun yet as I walk across the field
I can still see my shadow on the grass
a faint whisper of motion on the ground
always before me touching everything first
coloring every step I’m about to take
towards the new day so I turn around
it is still there larger and darker or is that the shadow
of what killed the old day standing up
to shrug off its sleep
Now we enter the season of our age
before summer’s end yellow leaves drift
haze floats between us and the foothills
still the sun is strong the rain when it comes
like the same words over and over
is not yet cold and when I look
between birds and hills I see the past
and am reminded of the future
Like a terminal bud, the future sits in dark resilience, weathering the present’s timeless winter, wrapped in the protection of tight embryonic leaves of the past, of memories packed in but not yet ripened which will unfold at the right moment, under accidental warmth or the persistent downpour of circumstance, they will unfold, crowning and surrounding that which has not yet happened in sudden green gestures growing as they are revisited and directing the warm rain of the mind to the center where the fruit is forming. All the colors of the spring are memories blooming and feeding the future. All this time we have misunderstood the past, blamed it for distracting us from the task at hand; it was never like that. Wasn’t the task at hand always shoveling snow? Wasn’t it always salting the walkway? Still we could not escape the present as we cannot escape a blizzard, the white-out of no context, the compulsion to turn one’s head from a cold wind. And when the future is finally ready, when the memories darken slightly in their turn across the sun’s ninety faces then the present will come, not knowing why it is coming, as bee or bird or squirrel come but do not know why, and take the future on the only journey it cannot travel itself. And if we wonder why we lose the memories it is because their work is done, they can finally loosen and twist away in the tug of the present. Already we will have forgotten what it was specifically that was done, the hand on your back lightly, the walk through the teeming streets, but it will have served the reason for that touch, its continuing love, it can be forgotten for the love is still waiting, just ahead, it has never left you, it has always come back, even as the ground beneath you stiffens with frost, it is what makes you see beauty in the momentary lapse of attention to the present which we mistake for the present moment, beautiful even in the coldest full moon of the year bright on the metal roof of an empty house.
Translations from the English 