The bluejay’s query from the previous twilight
hangs in the mostly empty air between branches.
On a brown maple leaf last night’s tear
has still not fallen. Though in a few hours
this moment will be gone like all the others
even grief sometimes has to wait its turn
The end of the stem
is where a flower starts. At the end
of a ragged leaf a sated bug steps.
The end of the trunk is where the tree
plunges past seeing and the roots’ ends
commence the purest conversion.
The river turns out on the ocean,
the sky turns over the bowl of stars
with no end to the spilling space.
Attending a Poetry Festival I Wonder What A World Full of Poets Would Be Like, And As I Leave the Building Into the Mid-Winter Afternoon Air I Hear the Late Migration Of a Canada Goose
In a room of a hundred poets my ego diminishes. My name grows so small
I can no longer find it on the program. But it turns out I am everywhere,
in every poem I hear, someone is calling my name! In the parking lot, in the cold air
above me a lone goose is calling as he flies, looking for companions traveling
his way. I look—no, he is not alone after all. There is one, silent, flying beside him.
The ice on the road sees us with our own eyes
and is no better than we are at helping ourselves
as direction changes. In a winter far south of here,
the edge of still water is guarded by cypress knees,
like a tired army that lay on their backs for a nap
and never found a reason to get up. Beyond them
I heard the bellow of a bull alligator claiming the world.
By a cold spring corn field a thousand miles
away, watching the storm’s wind sprint across
before it could be heard or felt, I know everything
can be claimed, like these memories—are the endless
chances to say hello merely a shout over the slumbering?
Is the wind with its violence finally hearing us with our ears?
I will sit here with you for a while and see what comes.
Note: one of an occasional series of poems with this title…
Leaves gather into a shape in a doorway, like an animal
sheltering from the wind. The hiss of cold wind
through the emptied maple. Stand in the small area
which owns the sound and close your eyes — like newspapers
burning in the fire place with the kindling. Late afternoon
all the steeples point up to forgetful blue emptiness.
But they’re empty on the inside too. In the dark, the moon climbs
up the roof and leaps in slow motion
Late night walks are making more sense
as I realize how little of my life
I am really seeing. Making it home each night
through the black ink of every word of hope
and doom engraved into the emptiness
surrounding me—isn’t it much better
practice than bounding about in daylight
thinking I am understanding everything?
In the dark the actual tree spreads without end,
across time and space, and I begin to sense
that my blindness also travels a route
set in deep earth, exposed to the sky.
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.
Roads diminish and clarify. People disappear.
The skunk is just being himself on the edge of the dark sidewalk.
On a certain night even he can see the dog-star.
Not shaking off the weather. All last summer the stooped old lady
laid her traps and could not flush him out of hiding. All summer
I spent mornings freeing trapped squirrels and possums
before the noon sun dehydrated them. She never came out
to see and neither did the skunk in her crawlspace. Now, crossing
the road, he looks up to the house as if remembering
or as if seeing through walls and latticework: here’s a place
I could make a home beneath. Here is a place I can depart
and come back to. A place I can impart the secret:
How to disappear but never leave. How to settle in
when all you will do at this age is preparation for leaving.
I would kneel with you any hour and pray to find that place.
If we wait long enough the wind will move the invisible aside.
Though there is far more space
between raindrops than there is rain
it is natural to feel the rain and not the dry space.
This evening: inside, dry, all I feel is the space
We disappear into the unseen ahead of us:
Already built, a bridge will reveal itself
when we arrive where a bridge is needed.
We’re not the first to make this trip.
Translations from the English 