We came here to the summer
it is a place like life is a place
On time’s window we are open and still
everything you want to say
But every time you look we are different
if you want us to survive you must
Stop glowing so we can find
our own way to the one you love
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
The abandoned asylum. The shell of a house next door
like the edge of some stranger’s attention span
you’re drawn to it because they’re gone, they gave up
without knowing that even in their judgment
even when they have turned their back things are
growing green spreading out in abandonment
*
building their own context indifferent to circumstance
with regard only for their new shape just as
I am spreading roots in the airy spaces between your words
to build for you a new and pleasing shape
Others may not notice it but it will last
that may be why it will last just
*
as words are an abandoned structure
as soon as they are uttered they are left vacant
Who will come fill them in live in them will you
be with me in all this space left by others
Can we make a home with quiet abandon
past the edge of even our own attention
Past the edge of what we think we want
Are the faithful the only ones who can recognize
what they have never seen or is this spilt milk
in my sink what it seems—a ragged host
reaching out to me as if it’s not too late
but for which of us her shape
will not hold but who knows the shape
of the abyss—it’s white like old eyes
failing and in reaching out it diminishes
shredding from the edges
towards the center which come
to find out can hold quite a lot
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
For the first time you see the rough draft of your life
complete. You now know—it’s a whale; it’s a shark;
It’s a school of fish. Silt in a tidal pool.
It’s a shadow of the plane passing overhead,
of the cloud into which the plane disappears.
For a moment there is no telling which direction
it is going, but it is all there; or whether its depth
Is imagined but it is all there is. Imagined or not.
To the world we go, extinguishing and compelled.
Early summer evening. Through a knot of fireflies
A few stars showing. To the world
an evening of fireflies and an epoch of stars
are the same, just what I see, no difference.
I will remember this firefly and this evening
as they travel at light’s speed into a past
beyond existence at the same speed a star’s memory
travels into the future to meet this evening,
this view. To the world depth starts to go
its own way towards deterioration and someone
determines it’s time to start counting the stars.
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.
I never swore I would not write a softball poem!
Darkness strides down the high hill towards the field.
Taking its time so the mist beneath it can depend
like a hanging plant, motionless every time you look.
I turn away to watch the game but something taps my shoulder–
the first drops of rain. People are running for their cars
With their softball gloves on their heads. Though it lasts
only five minutes, the rain turns the red clay infield
Into a giant thumb print of the storm. The umpire
examines it like a tired detective then calls it a night.
Unaffected as true fans, the bluebirds whir and swerve
across the outfield, shagging flies.
Translations from the English 