Heavy clouds drag night’s crooked river.
The body of sleepless hours is not found.
Above the atmosphere of days
the heart’s stone direction passes unseen
though out alone, in the cool rain
my skin is burning with its re-entry.
Standing in the back yard
of my heart.
No value
in raking a yard of wet leaves!
On my journey home
the clouds obscure the one road up the mountain
like gods who long
since forgetting what they have made
come this way again
recognizing nothing
A hundred hazard lights blinking
of strangers slowing through that veil
could be seen from a distance
as some kind of worship
A half hour later
the clouds will be gone the road will not remember
they were ever here
On the mountain’s other side
I see them again
three heads on the sky’s coins
all looking away
and then again above the valley floor ahead of me
a tail of a giant sea creature twelve miles long
diving into the horizon
I can bear the gods forgetting all they have made
until they no longer exist
even in memory
and have made nothing
how much heavier though is your forgetting
because I know you
did what the gods could not
Still I will follow these vanishing tracks
*
Note: The three title poems from my 2011 book Vanishing Tracks, and another poem entitled “Sestina, with Christmas Lights,” were written in honor of my mother, who at the time of their composition had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s but was still living with my father. These poems, of course, are about memory, family, the sacred nature of motherhood, loss, and loss suffered across a family in a manner that is keenly unique but which impacts the rest of your life’s views on everything, from identity to suffering to love.
Speak honestly with me — I am no decision.
I am an acknowledgment like a leaf landing
on the reflection of what it fell from acknowledges
it is not rejoining the tree but starting a new life
afloat on the agreeable other, unreflective,
its shape an utterance spreading out, unstoppable.
The contents matter less than the request
though I didn’t know what I was asking for,
that I was licked, inside my own opacity
unaware the asking was my only honesty
Mid-afternoon storm hours behind me, on the walk home.
Slight breeze triggers rain in the maple, cascading
leaf to leaf in the layers of small shadowed sky, not a memory
of rain but the actual rain, retained, in the vast shadows, actually
falling, and isn’t memory an actual thing moving in a real space,
and like the rain in this maple, not touching the ground.
It is more than how quickly these lines reach you.
It is that they move you. How through them
You change position in time. I used to think love
was the measure of an object’s rotational inertia,
Well not exactly in those words, but how things
in a given state should stay in that state without end
But I was mistaken, that measure is simply mass
as it spins or doesn’t, assuming further it has a center
Around which to spin and absolutely nothing
that could make it wobble or twist. Your hands
And wrist gently, impossibly, your neck and jaw
set the stillness spinning, under the hidden moon
And the leaves with their riot of turning stems
in the slight breeze and the alternating paths
They allow the light to the pavement
beneath the sycamore limbs, as we stand still
Moving on the inside, or move over time, love is the change
In direction or speed, love is the inconsistent
liveliness, the moving picture, projected on any surface,
love is just keeping up with it, keeping up.
On the mountain rain falls, snow melts.
The source of the river is the sky.
So it is that the source of love is not within reach
But flows over me and carves my every direction.
The source of the river is the spring. So it is
That I can never go back to the source of love
but it spends itself constantly on my behalf;
So it is that the very earth is between us
but the very earth gives a way to us in the shape
of a river. The source of the river is a bog.
Like energy, love has no direction. It can be hidden
as potential until the porous ground can hold
no more and it breaks into acceleration
embanked by our lives, carrying us beyond
ourselves towards a wider body evaporating into the sky
I left everything in a hotel room on my way to another
An eight year old boy rode his new bike with no training wheels
On the street I caught a blue pouch thrown by a stranger
I knew by how it settled into my palm it was a string of rosary beads
A butterfly fighting the gentle morning breeze on the hill again
and again to land on a dead squirrel and feed
Two early fireflies high in the ash tree’s night canopy
where earlier in the day hundreds of white flowers
Floated down, tiny parachutes onto new grass
The moon sparking off a tin roof like a match
My wife lay her head on my chest to listen to my heart
as I awoke from a dream of laughing
No wonder at dusk I find you sleeping in the hollows
in the crook of the mountain’s arm: you had so much
to carry, so much to let go: yet you are unchanged
Translations from the English 