Tag Archives: memory

Mirror, Cape Cod

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In the house my parents built. These mirrors have seen my face,
my naked body, for longer than any living thing: at twelve, sunburned

And skinny and flush with summer friendships from the beach;
at twenty-three, back from graduate school with the young writer

who’d become my wife, tired after walking ten miles from Hyannis
to Dennis to surprise my parents with a visit from Boston.

And now at fifty-six. Watching our three teenagers watch the sun
Set from the Cape’s highest point, stone tower a stone’s throw

From this house. O age inexorable and gentle has given me
A face weathered with seasons of gratitude. In this bathroom mirror is

An image of each time I’ve stood before it, in the same place,
Dripping wet, a little transparent, my selves seeing uneasily through each other’s

particular reflections. It took every second to get us all here.
No wonder the image wavers.

Outside and a mile away through scrub oak and sand the bay
glints with day’s embers, the slow ticking away of light

dropping through the horizon’s grate and the oncoming
Rolling rememberlessness of night, the countless

Reflections no one will see

Decision tree

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Decision tree

After the incident in the city I found the decision tree.
It spread towards heaven and hell from its trunk

in the yard of my grandmother’s house before her stroke.
Who goes there, she said, laughing. My grandmother

never said stuff like that. Who goes there? It’s me,
Grandma. I’m trying to figure out what to do.

You haven’t done the lawn in 39 years, she said,
standing in the driveway. The house’s current owners

drove through her ghost and parked. Can I help you,
asked the driver as he got out. I could have told him

Yes, you actually can help me, that’s what I came here
for, but you just ran through my grandmother and now

I’m a little confused. They’re all gone, she said, standing
by my side. Do you remember how your sister would

give me hard candies when I lived with you all, she said.
She’s gone. No she’s not, I said, she’s still here, she

has two daughters, they’re in college, she married Ernie
don’t you remember Ernie? Oh, she’s long gone said

my grandmother. They all are. She was walking away
back toward the house. Do you remember when we

surprised you at the Cape and brought you and Peg
ice cream from the Ice Cream Smuggler, I called

to her. Is that all gone, too? Am I gone? She kept walking,
through the man and his car and his two children still sitting

in the car, and they all sneezed. Then I felt her hand
on my shoulder. You go on, her voice said. You don’t

need a tree to tell you that. It was a maple, that tree
and one night even lightning couldn’t kill it.

The Draw

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IMG_8396

The Draw

Almost solvable riddle of woods.
We are rooted in the underword.

Absence the untitled chapter.
The drawer of memory creaks

In its not quite closed position
Warped by incremental tears.

An empty house draws me
Dug into a soft hill of oak and arrowhead.

Crows zoning over the tree canopy
Level with the loft room windows

And my mother’s abandoned dresses.
Send a sand dune home.

November hymnal (19)

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November hymnal (19)

After freezing rain, the slow burn continues.
Ice burns, air burns. Morning mist clarifies

Into a river’s moving lens.
Sliding faster than fire.

This will always be the month of my unbecoming.
November burnishes the mind’s naked bark

As the details drift down to a grass blade’s slow spark.
The recent past dead at your feet but covering

Everything. There is no forgetting
No remembering only

November containing everything
Changing past changed future.

And on the ground the hovering
Vulture’s static shadow.

The Sound

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evergreen stars

The Sound

There will be no meeting. Go deeper– is it quiet there?
He is the one you could never have. Though he could

Never not be yours. Deeper– it’s the sound of waking.
When we were younger we could drink a lot more

Coffee. I remember our first cup together. In the depths
Of the night, its upside down ocean, sound is replaced

By a strange pressure on the ears. On the entire surface
Of your body. This is where fissures open up in the roof

And new mountains emerge. It’s where stars are born.
Where a shy medallion spilled from God’s pirate ship

twined through the waves of dark sleep and became
The moon. Some hearts would explode from the pressure

Mine is like the cork that has to be pushed back
Into the wine bottle corkscrewed side down. Torn

But doing its job. Deeper but not so deep
You couldn’t pluck it out with your bare hand.

Sometimes a memory is tame as soft rain, deeper
than falling asleep, like a read book empty and full

at the same time, the sound of a candle in the room.

From the City of Gloucester, with regards to trash pickup

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From the City of Gloucester, with regards to trash pickup*

Do not put out your trash tonight. The sky glitters with ice like glass
Slivers escaping the recycler, but made of purest water. They can land on your tongue

And you shall not be harmed. Do not put out what you have already
Disposed of, tonight in that monotone cold. Everything you no longer

Wanted will be covered up and turned overnight to something
Beautiful, a unique shape that will never be seen again.

The morning temperatures will rise and you will soon forget
The shapes of wonder that gathered before your door

And even as the snow recedes your memory will stick out its tongue
And your heart coming back to you will feel like walking on broken glass.

*

*Title stolen from a reminder on WordPress to residents of Gloucester, MA not to put their trash out because of the impending snow storm. Same situation tonight in Staunton, VA as the snow begins to fall. I love Gloucester and mean no offense. The title of that WordPress post just cried out to have a poem written beneath them. / JS

October 27 [Book of October]

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October 27

Before the soft rain the leaves
Finally sing their groundswell chant

They who met the sun first each day
Now embracing the earth without regret

Walking through the leaves releases
Whispers of crisp wishes burning

The air we breathe is on fire with wishes
The soft rain gathers in the branches

Overhead, hovers, a dark respectful canopy.
It’s not used to going any farther but where

Are the hands that caught it so easily
And sent it to the center of things

The Switch

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The Switch

–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–

June Flight

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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.

Dream, First Full Night of the Year

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Dream, First Full Night of the Year

I am one of four men entrusted with delivering refugees
from a disputed territory. The road lays over bare hills and open

fields. Everyone carries only what they need. I carry
their memories, so I can only take half a step at a time.

When the first bomb explodes by the roadside, the others
are already far ahead of me. The memories are important

but sometimes you have to outrun memories to escape.
I am cresting a hill, beyond it are more hills and small fires

where the bombs have landed. Gunfire bounces off the road
nearby and I break from the path, dropping nothing,

staying low. Somewhere there have to be trees, undergrowth,
a forest, where I can escape the ground.