Mid-morning snow after a night of sleet.
Ice is melting off the roofs, descending
faster than flakes can fall, but they go
only their own speed, unconcerned
with making up the distance
At every room in the house the sound of rain is tapping.
Like the echo of us trying to tap on the wall
to see if what is on the other side is listening.
How what’s outside us is there, there.
How it doesn’t want in. With an open window
it is still content with leaves on the ground.
Now that it is done I should know who I am
and why I did it and who I did it for now
that it is arrived the end should be a secret
passage back to the beginning and this
unfinished space a private garden at world’s
end and the buried seeds break anew now that
destruction’s heat has called them open and when
things begin that are unexpected we should have
expected them back here at the beginning knowing
everything that follows but because nothing
follows the end I should know I’m not there now
that it is done and where are you now that
It is done you should know who you are
With a moon not yet full behind a sky not yet clear
a glowing handprint floats over the house
holds emptiness like a drifting welcome
closed to nothing always open to you
Winter begins in the stones. In a dream the sky house
gets closer as if it is trying to hear a secret or tell me one
but when I can read its lips I see it is just pretending.
In the car: stones from a trip to the beach.
A thousand miles from where we found them
for months they have rested in a drink holder
with no discernible nature acting on them,
no car tides or car gulls have hampered their stillness.
Now when we pick them up on a drive we marvel
at how cold they are on this mild first day of November.
You can press them to your hand, your neck, your cheek
and they stay cold. They are telling me a secret
without moving their lips or pretending to tell me anything.
They are coming closer without moving, like snow clouds.
O star you should have known
not even your memory will eclipse you
No distance will establish a shadow
between this heart and yours
The light that comes back to me
from something larger—is it
not my own joy which without you
I would never know?
A night too cold for crickets. The moon crested
the rocky crust of the east a full two hours
before sunset, a beacon over the reddening
mountain shaped clouds inhaling the last
of the sun. Eighty five point something percent
full, isn’t that enough for this to reach you?
Lunar Occultation
Halfway up the maple, the moon looks
suspended in a mesh of telephone wires.
A few hours ago it blotted a bright blue
planet from the sky—it takes 84 Earth years
for a single year to pass there but the moon
obscures it in ten seconds before its thirteen
rings can split the horizon. On this harvest month
it can dim even the dog star but now it needs my help—
tilting my head in homage I take a few steps
to the right, and the moon is free.
*
Author’s note: The lunar occultation referred to is when the moon passes in front of a planet, in tonight’s case, Uranus. I combined this with the visual experience I had in my front yard this evening. In the long run, I think the version of the poem below, shorter and without the additional planet-specific info, may be the final form this poem takes. Because the specific information about how distance affects time and perception, is very interesting to me, and just kinda cool, I wanted to share the original poem above as well. Due to an unfortunate hit-and-run accident soon after its formation, Uranus is also a strangely tilted planet, thus the reference in the last stanza. Feel free to comment on which version you prefer. Lunar Occultation Halfway up the maple, the moon looks
Meaning of a Dream
Alone in the house, in my bedroom, turning to go. The door to the closet is shutting, though I hadn’t noticed it open, I cross the room and walk into it. The closet stretches out around the house, goes around the back of the fireplace up here on the second floor, continues on, and someone is walking with her back to me. Hey, I say. What are you doing here? Who are you? She continues as if a ghost who didn’t hear me. I speed up to a trot around another corner. The closet begins to look like the basement of my grandmother’s house. I used to run as a child in a thin alley between the wood paneled walls of the bar my grandfather and father built in one half of the basement and the concrete wall of the foundation, with its wires and water pipes and mousetraps, though it was just a ranch in those days it expanded with the adventurous mind, had strange back alleys like a little town. I cannot catch up, I raise my voice, Hey! Come back, who are you? At the same time I can hear an echo of my voice, but it’s not an echo, it’s an actual voice coming from a man asleep on his bed, sounding to my inner ear like a bleating sheep, even though I can still hear myself loud and clear and strident as I lose ground in the chase, and my wife begins coaxing me awake with some words I cannot quite hear, and then I’m pulled backwards and downwards, as if my being is slipping out of my head and filling up the space in my waking body. I sit up. In the dark I shuffle to my desk and turn on the lamp. I know what this dream means, I just need to write it down, it’s about how the people and memories that inhabit your mind do not answer to you, they come and go in ways you cannot control, and whether it’s my mother’s vanished memory of our entire family history or my own memories or simple deciduous thoughts sprouting decoratively and cycling through their dream seasons I also know that this poem is how I’ll own it, exert some control over it in this part of my life bound to time and sleep, this is how I’ll remember not to take it personally that I’m not the one who owns this house, there’s some other me in another room who just saw this moment of his life walk by without so much as acknowledging him. When I wake up a few hours later I cannot read a word that I wrote, but I can follow the shape of it as it walks away on the page in the morning light and describe that.
At my feet a silent tide
The midsummer light’s crashed
through the trees, fills the grass
recedes and foams to nothing
In the shadow of mountains the ocean
comes to me as you once did
Translations from the English 