Does the insect know he has a shadow
or what it is cast from
When he moves from lamplight
and the moon cannot remember him
behind the scrim of rain and the shadow drifts
into illegibility does it add its unknowing
to the black page these lines are my shadow
are what the moon remembers
In the dream the same beach
we’ve never been to together
is calling though once we stood
on a jetty watching the sun
read the gathering clouds
the riot act sometimes you have
to lower yourself as well to circumstances
to rise some place else entirely
*
The waves here
slide across and beneath
each moment grand tectonics
some brought to level
annihilation by incremental loss
some subsumed by a surge
of gain so that what they’ve gained
gains them in final shape
Waves crash—a murmur
in the moon’s ear—still asking
who is pulling whom
Moon over city
of ten million lights as
seen by only one
Storm fells big branches
while gossamer lines linger—
the strand between us
*
Long after strong rain
moves on, forgotten, moss on
branches remembers
*
Light flickers inside and out.
Dove on shed roof hears
a thousand unseen frogs
*
The day starts again
hours before dusk. In sunlight
palmetto fronds drip.
Shadows on the sidewalk of leaves in motion
above me are like the shadows of flames
the leaves are burning but the burn is slower it is a burn
we can inhabit or control are the leaves our days
how can we see it in the leaves still green and flexible
how can we see the beginning and end of it all in the shadows
how does the time difference work is it the same
when I send out words to you here in my midsummer
why do I feel the entirety of me burning
As soon as I have finished reading this poem
to you, you will begin forgetting it.
I have written it many times
but it can be read only once.
You are thinking if you read it
and I read it then that is more
Than once only but those
are different poems. This one
Is for you alone. Take a moment
to enjoy being in the middle of it.
I will even skip a line for you to take it all in:
And when you have read it the words
will fall away almost
immediately though the poem never
will nor old love and what travels with it
the line you’ll never forget
after all will be the one I skipped for you
Haven’t seen the moon
for a week. Are you there with
me, beyond all cloud?
On the east coast by the bay at the top
of a hill overlooking a lake filled they say
when a great whale thrown by a winter storm
crashed there or filled they say by the tears
of a young woman from the Scargo tribe
when it was clear her life would not be the same
and over the belt of a waist-high stone wall at the top
of a tower there though you are looking west
with me the width of a continent is a thread across
the horizon and above it the sun lowers itself
ablaze on the bay before it and again on the lake
of tears or it is the resigned eye of the whale still
lying there its shape waiting for the tide to bring it
back I have seen the sun set over two bodies
of water the strip of land scrub oak and pine between them
wider than the continent beyond a hundred times
from here I have seen the riotous light lean against clouds
knowing my home was here above the crown
of the highest tree I’ve chatted with tourists taken pictures
for them stood here long after they have left
felt the wind rush in over the trees gathering stones
when it was clear my life would not be the same
and now I am coming back again to this stone place
where looking over endless land you see nothing
but water and sky and the wide scrim
of a welcoming light that does not remember me
The sagging bottom of the sky tears on the mountain
and the gray spilling down ten miles away eventually
obscures the entire ridgeline. I’m out here to see the first
full moon rising on a Friday the thirteenth in June
in a hundred years, and now the horizon is missing.
In the highest branches of the old walnut tree
the leaves are flinging the last rays of sun away
with such chaotic gusto I can’t tell where the wind
is coming from. Closer to the ground the silver maple
holds its leaves out completely level, motionless
as if confirming that, somewhere, here for
the moment anyway, all is calm. The mist arrives
on slender legs ten minutes later, apologetically calm
and thinning the distance: the mountains have moved closer
like how a memory of someone far away suddenly appears
as a thing you want to climb, or a barrier on the path.
And still there is no moon. In bed before midnight
I feel a sudden rush of love for you
as if I myself had just broken through life’s haze,
glowing and spherical, irreducible, reaching without
fail. While the most I see out my window later
is a wedge of pure light through the shifting clouds
I will remember that moon and who I was suddenly,
how love shone off me from light’s source.
Translations from the English 