Each night’s just an evening long
why should it feel like you are lost forever
just because I cannot see you where
I am looking but this overcast between us
lasts longer than reflection
–then everything else which turns off at night
is the switch that turns on the crickets
is there a thing at all in cricketsong
that means I remember
that bridges the slow heaving wave
of frozen ground between years
is there anything
by which they know they go on
do they need to when they hear
with their legs by which they leap only forward
and sing with their wings which cannot take them backward
what else must a cricket do to prove it needs
no memory
*
behind my house at night I forget
I am in a city the song is so loud
like the earth breathing in and out
the owl marking his territory in the pitch dark
is absorbed into the song it seems impossible
there could be as many crickets on the ground
as there are cricket voices in the air
till the sun climbs over a rock and shuts them off
in the morning which is the switch
for ten thousand starlings to fill the space
with another season–
The emptiness you carry now
says more to me than words you once held
whatever it was long gone
not the message but the fact it was held
is why I held on to you
you carried those words across the decades
to where I would finally understand them
and now even empty you carry the name
of what became of what I wasn’t ready for
Receipts from something not a book.
The tongues of fortune cookies.
An envelope containing nothing,
the tears folded flat.
It might have been the last time
your name was written by that hand.
A bill you wanted to avoid opening
now opens a click of space
bigger than money, traveling time
by staying still. Something not a book
waits where you left the words.
It will take your attention like a ticket
whose destination is next time,
which you will shove in a book
to hold your place when the
landscape carries you away.
The moon sticks from the sky like a cat’s
claw snagged in a dark gray carpet.
Except the room is moving, the carpet is
shifting until the entire crescent, unmoving,
is visible. And like something caught
in a dream it hangs there and does not fall.
Those things that are so much bigger
than we think they are. That are not caught at all.
This is how the month tasted, too. Full and lush on the front,
a vacation rental that is not too big or expensive but rich.
On the back, like the sound of surf slipping through the sand,
the taste of something going away, complexity escaping completion, dry on the tongue.
In a mind as mild as an eight o clock sky in early June
a thought swoops by like a swallow or bat
too quick for me to identify it by flight pattern
though it’s a thought that swerves and starts
again and once again after something unseen
not a thought that travels distances well but I’m not going far
content on the porch of my consciousness
a small level space on the outside of a house
I will never enter. The breeze
in my mind comes from someplace else and the thought banks impressively
in the same way logic sometimes makes us think we have direction.
The mind sky’s crayon color is half time and half heavy air
and despite its endlessness the thoughts flying in its late afternoon light compete
for an even smaller piece of space
held by a memory the size of a twilight’s tremoring bug
something I cannot even see but something that feeds the thought —
the whole reason the thought took flight is that this is the time
the memories come out of the earth and rise;
what they are doing there I do not know. Inside my house
in each room ceiling fans are rotating just above lamps shaped like leaves.
Perhaps they are turbines of an unknown will, a helicopter fleet in reverse
trying to keep the house from flying up in the air as it eventually will
like the tiniest memory of something bigger than my life
rising into the chasm of June light.
Last night I heard the first crickets of the year
and the first click and hum of air-conditioning units
five hours before my own calendar page turned over again–
I was in the woods of my mind, looking for a word that never lived
in the way some look for creatures that cannot be
where they have been seen though it cannot be doubted
something has been seen. By looking for this mystery
I was creating the word. Is this how love is created?
A word that suddenly obtains meaning and mystery
in the deepest neck of our woods? Five hours
from the fifty first anniversary of what I cannot remember
the machines and fans hijacked the night
lifted it in the bothered air like helicopters waiting
on every building to take off. But they never leave.
History just another season we can’t hear change
traveling as we are, faster than the speed of truth.
The mystery opens like the mouth of a wolf
and closes like bare feet running on a path
and in the middle is a window neither open nor closed
and a festival we can attend only as words to each other.
It spreads out like a spill against forgetting.
All the grounded helicopters
are silenced when the thunder knocks the power out
and people open their windows cautiously
one day closer to forgetting there was a night
without open windows and crickets.
The bare feet of a word prowl across my eyelids.
Each footprint is different, like a word in many languages.
The cars approach and diminish but the road goes nowhere.
The storm stands across the street and says go.
Panic fans out.
The grass migrating without moving.
One blade bending to talk and the other
to listen … but to some other voice,
arriving from a distance. A voice with the tongue of a shadow
as if all this light traveling ninety million miles amounted
to a message smaller than a grassblade.
How small this poem must be in the field of minds!
I heard some people talking as they walked
across the wide green library yard, laughing
at a study suggesting that plants and trees
communicate. One bent his head toward the other,
whose face, angled away from the sun,
was obscured in the late afternoon shadows.
Sitting on the mid-afternoon porch
of your life, the day seems still.
Buildings not moving, memories
like distant clouds.
Then the sun moves, shadows
lengthen. The clouds
are getting closer.
Translations from the English 