Rain on a day off differs
from rain on a business day.
On the road it is fine but soaking.
Under the tree one is protected
from rain’s penetrating consistency
though drops recombine sometimes
on their way through the leaves
with larger consequence
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.
Maybe aged twelve, I started staying up past 11
watching the local news with my dad
cup of tea and the Yankees score the daily last things
Tea that late never kept me awake
it was for time with my father
and learning tomorrow’s weather
In my dorm at college it attracted curiosity
people started coming to my room at eleven
arriving with mugs steaming coming to see the day done
One winter night we took it outside
into the courtyard in a snow flurry
three dozen students in flannel
pajamas sweatpants boots and mugs
spelling out T-E-A in giant letters
not a protest just a confirmation
atypical for that time and age
Tonight we talk after the kids are asleep
while you bathe I make you tea
which we take upstairs to our room
where last night a strange green insect
watched me from the windowsill
while I drank tea and wrote
about a dream and slept by you
awoke to today an empty cup to fill
This windy September night the air’s as noisy as any
shallow stream
Beyond it the stars shimmer through time’s waves
Beyond them lies the unreachable
river bed
Beyond that if there is any bedrock to the soul
of the universe will I find you whole
again there
or will it be an imprint on an eon’s sediment
of what has passed
both of us
already becoming others in another time
Meaning of a Dream
Alone in the house, in my bedroom, turning to go. The door to the closet is shutting, though I hadn’t noticed it open, I cross the room and walk into it. The closet stretches out around the house, goes around the back of the fireplace up here on the second floor, continues on, and someone is walking with her back to me. Hey, I say. What are you doing here? Who are you? She continues as if a ghost who didn’t hear me. I speed up to a trot around another corner. The closet begins to look like the basement of my grandmother’s house. I used to run as a child in a thin alley between the wood paneled walls of the bar my grandfather and father built in one half of the basement and the concrete wall of the foundation, with its wires and water pipes and mousetraps, though it was just a ranch in those days it expanded with the adventurous mind, had strange back alleys like a little town. I cannot catch up, I raise my voice, Hey! Come back, who are you? At the same time I can hear an echo of my voice, but it’s not an echo, it’s an actual voice coming from a man asleep on his bed, sounding to my inner ear like a bleating sheep, even though I can still hear myself loud and clear and strident as I lose ground in the chase, and my wife begins coaxing me awake with some words I cannot quite hear, and then I’m pulled backwards and downwards, as if my being is slipping out of my head and filling up the space in my waking body. I sit up. In the dark I shuffle to my desk and turn on the lamp. I know what this dream means, I just need to write it down, it’s about how the people and memories that inhabit your mind do not answer to you, they come and go in ways you cannot control, and whether it’s my mother’s vanished memory of our entire family history or my own memories or simple deciduous thoughts sprouting decoratively and cycling through their dream seasons I also know that this poem is how I’ll own it, exert some control over it in this part of my life bound to time and sleep, this is how I’ll remember not to take it personally that I’m not the one who owns this house, there’s some other me in another room who just saw this moment of his life walk by without so much as acknowledging him. When I wake up a few hours later I cannot read a word that I wrote, but I can follow the shape of it as it walks away on the page in the morning light and describe that.
Two hundred thousand hands
are clapping for the rain
There’s nothing—
the August crossing
assures us—we can do
with the moon as thin
as a rabbit’s ear
every emotion leaping
like a toad on a
dry white mountain
Five white petals on a black flower
among many in an orange field on the sliver of wing
of an insect pausing by the sill then flying then forgotten
nine months later—my first five decades
jss
We foresee our deaths
sacrifice the days one after the other to a slow motion panic
believing if we are senseless in a consistent and calm manner
that we can’t be blamed for not being ready for the only thing
we knew was coming
If time moves in a wave then behind us
foams a wake of wasted moments wasted the moment
we look back given up to the future day that never asked for sacrifice
and that never arrives
and if it did would never be any longer than a wasted day
How is it that giving up on a dream translates always
in any language into not doing something we could do
today in the wakeful world right now instead
we plant the sharp end and open slowly the gorgeous umbrella
of panic beneath the sun of death
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
Translations from the English 