Tag Archives: love

Lament Over Nothing

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Lament Over Nothing

 

Somewhere between the tired moon’s glow and my unfocused eyes
I keep seeing winter—snow heaps when it’s just a white van

Across the street; accumulation on the metal roof next door
instead of the bored shine of a lazy evening rain. Tomorrow

It’s spring, I know, and the rain outside should sound less
like ice and more like the first words of flowers and grass.

Wife! every night you cradle your guitar for an hour and put the spirits
in harmony. Come over here and pick me up! And put me back in tune.

No. 36

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Note: While preparing for the Bridgewater International Poetry Festival — and working on some book design for “The Drift” and “Moon & Shadow” (tentative title for the collection of poems featuring Mei Yao-ch’en) — I will from time to time post a poem from one of my books published before I began this blog. This is from The Artificial Horizon, published in 2013.

No. 36

Quiet night. Even the crickets are whispering,
Beneath the green stamp of this date, your name
In a language I can’t speak but can read.
Above the summer moon’s shiny memory
A thought of you coaxes deep stars
Into the precise constellation
That is your voice saying my name.
The rudder of years has shown my choice.
This year will not accumulate around you
Any better than a kitten accumulates moths.
The moment is the distribution, not a sum.
Of everything a cricket can sing, or not.
Of every thing you understand because it’s not clear and caught.
So I will walk in the empty feeling house.
The night hangs on every wall, black mirrors.
When I look at it I see myself looking in
Wondering what I am doing out there without you.
The danger of reflection is thinking you’re alone
When you’re not. Of thinking crickets without voices
Are whispering your name when it’s me whispering,
In a language I can’t read but can speak.

Still

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Still

Waiting on this cold night for the moon to rise over the roof
of the house next to mine. So cold if the stars shiver the sky

will crack. So still that a moon cannot rise.
Still enough that I get tired of waiting on the world’s motions,

crawl in bed and shoulder under the blanket
and when I raise my head stars and  moon have sped their arc

into tomorrow, the spears of dawn are rattling in the street,
and nothing has stayed still about the world

except my place in it, beside you, still spooning me
in your sleep, your breath soft on my neck as a bird

shadow skims the winter wind outside the window
and a shaking branch stands by, slurs, stills, and you stir.

*

for my wife Mary, on her birthday.

Setting Moon, with Constellations, One Night Before Its First Quarter, Late December

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Setting Moon, with Constellations, One Night Before Its First Quarter, Late December

 

When the moon sinks low in the western sky
I pour a day’s memories into its gold cup

as the old rules state. Evening is cooling off
but mild, as if between myself and

the stars there is an owl flying away while at the same
time a distant unknown bird is approaching.

When they pass each other I am finding the key
in my pocket and feeling blindly for the lock.

When the cup is locked in the cupboard
of the past for another day, in the quiet house

I take out the moments I withheld from the moon
and place them in the dark above me: your hand

on my arm, your head against my shoulder.
The phone ringing. The living warmth of you

like a foreign language I can suddenly read
as words pour into the room and we listen.

To the Tune of a Song Not Yet Written [4]

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To the Tune of a Song Not Yet Written [4]

 

I walk up my own street after sunset.
The moon is not yet up and the last streetlight

is behind me. Slowly, slowly I trudge up the hill
and slowly, slowly my shadow fades into the dark bricks.

I have lost myself and where I am going
but with no streetlights the roof has been taken off

the world. If I stood still I could find and count a star
for each of the eighteen thousand days I have lived so far.

Here in the dark stretch of street they are with me.
With my shadow gone and the dark bricks

pretending not to move at the speed of stars.

The Present [#FullMoonSocial2014]

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The Present

 

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?

Rehearsal

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Rehearsal

 

Reading together on the couch.  In wordless motion
my daughter gets up and walks out of sight.

Just to the kitchen, this time, for water, but I sit quietly
and prepare, listening to her steps moving away.

Tonight

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Tonight

For a while I will sit up listening
to the crickets. Your head on my lap.

I know, I know peace is balanced on
a blade of grass in a breeze

but tonight I am that blade
and nothing will fall

To the Tune of a Song Not Yet Written

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Note: another of a series of poems with the same title, to be scattered throughout a larger project called The Drift.
 

To the Tune of a Song Not Yet Written

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