Tag Archives: summer

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

The King of Frederick Street

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Note: As the Yankees and Red Sox square off for the first time this endless pandemic summer, I’m reminded of a poem from my 2013 book 20 Poems & Other Translations from the English, which is about my father’s last visit to Virginia. He was afraid to leave his wife, who suffered from Alzheimer’s, for too long, but he spent a week with us and it was wonderful. It was also the last time we watched a Yankees game together until the month he would die, last July. So just a nod to my dad that I’m still watching.

The King of Frederick Street

Almost eighty, my father is surrounded
by my children, their dogs and cats
while wrestling a Solitaire game whose battery

will not seem to die. We set a folding chair
on our elevated patch of lawn
where the maple’s shadow slows and slurs

across his feet, sliding up the grass
to the house like an instant replay
of a baserunner sliding past him safely home.

It takes an hour, but now he rests in the sun.
The King of Frederick Street, we call him,
sitting on a lawn above car level on the high

side of this crooked hill, watching cars
go by, too fast, he notes, for a street
with children. Seven hundred

miles to the north his wife does not remember
most of while she’s loved. Still, him she loves
and recognizes four times a week,

musses his hair and strokes his nose and laughs,
and now does not beg to be released.
From love and parenthood there’s no escape,

also no home safe to slide past and drag
a hand across the plate just beneath
Death’s late tag. Though I can see him

try to calculate the odds, the angry focus
like leading off third, game on the line.
Pop–the Yankees are on at eight. He’ll come

Then, pick up that infernal Solitaire game
and we’ll play it side by side on the couch,
stand for the anthem and work the count

as innings race by in slow motion.
I glance across the thirty year gap
And know the years will thin;

Meanwhile, we sit, and compete
at who’s best at being alone.
He wins and wins.

Running behind

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IMG_8982

Running behind

Summer’s running behind feels a bit mean
To a person already running behind,

A forced vertigo of sorts I can’t calibrate
My own behind-ness to: here in the early

Autumn of my life I’m still sweating
A summer boy’s things and the blurring

Faces of those I run by on the street
Of my life. I’m worried about what I’m

Missing by not standing still. By never
Getting up to speed. Time runs ahead,

The orange soles of her sneakers glistening
Over night’s damp suburban grass.

One wet evening, in the light of a white-faced lawn
Jockey, she’ll be waiting, stretching her legs

For a last run with me.

Happy

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happy

Happy

Even if it weren’t happening now
As in a happiness in the past

Or a happiness anticipated
It can be read like a poem

Fixed in the climate of stars
Visible or invisible above us.

Not touchable but undeniably
Touching us like a breeze or shadow.

It’s not gratitude. Happiness gave its
Train ticket or last drink or favorite book

to gratitude and even if gratitude didn’t
Read the book it carried it on the train

And paged through it. Of course you can’t
Be grateful for a drink unless you drink it.

Gratitude’s empty glass. Book as a coaster.
The years of spilled thoughts. Happiness

Like apprehending the earth’s curvature
Or finding the denominator of God.

Whether you believe in it or not
It will keep saving you.

Early Summer Evening

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mantisjune

Early Summer Evening

After the rain I walk around the peony plants.
The praying mantises stand on the leaves,

Dozens of them, like vacationers in a hotel
On their balconies. Looking out at a place

They have never seen before but will master.
Nobody so much at glances at the plants

Once the flowers are gone but I do.
To me it feels like I am growing them.

They are my flowers. Maybe God feels like this:
He cannot save a single one of us from what

Will prey on us or what we ourselves will maim
Or kill but he can watch us change and grow.

Inside the house there are no stars. You can’t
Throw a wish far enough away that its ricochet

Will not eventually get you. In the dark, after
The rain, the candles like mute trees.

In the silence, after the brief flare of sulfur,
You can hear fire chew a matchstick.

Myth

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Myth

A cloud’s shadow slid down the side
Of the mountain and onto the lake.

The darkened depths gave it a body.
A child treading water breathing in

A gulp gave it a voice. A father charging
Into the water gave it direction. A second

Of sun gone missing for all of us
Gave it witnesses. Nobody looked up

And saw the cloud, which never looked down.

Summer Midnight

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cactus1

Summer Midnight

A man wakes in a hotel room
In an unfamiliar time zone. He has all his memory

and yet he carries nothing with him from that time.
Like the new summer from the spring he is all effect and no cause.

Outside in the dark he walks as if on the floor of a great sea.
But the ground plants have sucked all the water from the place

And have taken on a strange bristly beauty as if floating upwards.
Opening his mouth to say a name the word dries on his tongue.

One hundred and eleven degrees: three above auspicious.
Of the river his lover grew up alongside and the low-tide’s waves

Of the bay he knew as a child he hears nothing. But he hears
a message as when a great wave has washed over you

And floating in the foam you find a scrawled message
from the past forecasting that a wave is about to crash.

The hotel swallows the moon like a horizon.
One lizard on a row of stones.

Mid-day coffee, garden path northeast of Phoenix

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PHO sky in coffee

Mid-day coffee, garden path northeast of Phoenix

Sun is a small white speck on the liquid’s curving edge
Halfway down the paper cup. In the depths

The trees are turning, turning on the caramel sky
That has already consumed half the day.
.
Wakefulness branches out across the surface
Of consciousness.Inside the hotel, thousands

Of my colleagues are putting a lid on such thoughts
To walk quickly to the next meeting. I will leave

It all uncovered, walk more slowly than I need,
Carry the sky inside like an open notepad.

Wren

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Wren

Summer. The wren in the young willow
Swivels with the speed of a missed tag

In a back yard game of chase. What I am
Chasing I’m glad to miss. What I hold

On to is the untouchable joy of losing
A race to my daughter. The air after

Rain. It’s late spring, early June, and
You cannot convince children

out of school that it’s not summer.