FOG

The fog comes

on little cat feet.

It sits looking

over harbor and city

on silent haunches

and then moves on.

Trying to have something left over

There was a great tenderness to the sadness
when I would go there. She knew how much
I loved my wife and that we had no future.
We were like casualties helping each other
as we waited for the end. Now I wonder
if we understood how happy those Danish
afternoons were. Most of the time we did not talk.
Often I took care of the baby while she did
housework. Changing him and making him laugh.
I would say Pittsburgh softly each time before
throwing him up. Whisper Pittsburgh with
my mouth against the tiny ear and throw
him higher. Pittsburgh and happiness high up.
The only way to leave even the smallest trace.
So that all his life her son would feel gladness
unaccountably when anyone spoke of the ruined
city of steel in America. Each time almost
remembering something maybe important that got lost.

Shaking the Tablecloth

Some pleasures come undiluted; on October mornings
when the sun aimed its last, cumulated gold
over our depleted grape arbor, the baked raisins
turned black, wizened solar memories, the air at the edge
of town coming on with a sauterne bite of cold,
and the Kentucky sky high in a preternatural, almost
a Tiepolo blue, my mother would go to the open
kitchen door, with one of our two surviving tablecloths
under her arm and, leaning out, would shake out crumbs.

Even when there were not crumbs, the ritual of morning
from last night's supper was her excuse to feel the air,
and look on past fences to the bold, emblazoned woodland,
and unlike her eyes to the wanton circumference of the world.
I saw her shaking the white linen she had washed and ironed,
gazing beyond. It was a great chance she had every day
to do something ritualistic and free; and like wine
poured over me, intoxicated credence, faith.
That a shook cloth had in it all that distancing.

nazm uljhi hui hai seene mein

nazm uljhi hui hai seene mein
misare atke hue hain hothon par
udate phirte hain titaliyon ki tarah
lafz kaagaz pe baithate hi nahin
kab se baithaa hun main jaanam
saade kaagaz pe likh ke naam tera
bas tera naam hi mukammal hai
is se behtar bhi nazm kyaa hogi

In an Old Apple Orchard

The wind’s an old man
to this orchard; these trees
have been feeling
the soft tug of his gloves
for a hundred years.
Now it’s April again,
and again that old fool
thinks he’s young.
He’s combed the dead leaves
out of his beard; he’s put on
perfume. He’s gone off
late in the day
toward the town, and come back
slow in the morning,
reeling with bees.
As late as noon, if you look
in the long grass,you can see him
still rolling about in his sleep.

Talking in Bed

Talking in bed ought to be easiest
Lying together there goes back so far
An emblem of two people being honest.

Yet more and more time passes silently.
Outside the wind's incomplete unrest
builds and disperses clouds about the sky.

And dark towns heap up on the horizon.
None of this cares for us. Nothing shows why
At this unique distance from isolation

It becomes still more difficult to find
Words at once true and kind
Or not untrue and not unkind.

Keeping House

On the grand steppes

of the poetry of other poets

I go far beyond

Even though I can see

the white haze of noon on

the city street

I still go far beyond.

I must return

to the buying of onions and coffee.

Postage stamps.

I Ask My Mother to Sing

She begins, and my grandmother joins her.
Mother and daughter sing like young girls.
If my father were alive, he would play
his accordion and sway like a boat.

I’ve never been in Peking, or the Summer Palace,
nor stood on the great Stone Boat to watch
the rain begin on Kuen Ming Lake, the picnickers
running away in the grass.

But I love to hear it sung;
how the waterlilies fill with rain until
they overturn, spilling water into water,
then rock back, and fill with more.

Both women have begun to cry,
But neither stops her song.

Stargazing

She keeps trying
to show me Orion,
pointing to his belt
in the night sky,
and I try to picture him
—but I've never been much
of a hunter, for food
or for love, for that matter.

Now, Auden may be right,
poetry might make nothing happen,
but when she points
I think of Roethke,
how he wrote he measured time
by the swaying of a body
and I know
I measure something
older and far more still
by how three distant suns
can balance
on the tip of her finger.

Seen

noon heat haze-
a jacaranda
in every pane

The Hush of the Very Good

You can tell by how he lists

to let her kiss him, that the getting, as he gets it,

is good.

It’s good in the sweetly salty, deeply thirsty way that a sea-fogged

rain is good after a summer-long bout

of inland drought.

And you know it

when you see it, don’t you? How it

drenches what’s dry, how the having

of it quenches.

There is a grassy inlet

where your ocean meets your land, a slip

that needs a certain kind of vessel,

and

when that shapely skiff skims in at last,

trimmed bright, mast lightly flagging left and right,

then the long, lush reedsof your longing part, and soft against

the hull of that bent wood almost

imperceptibly brushes a luscious hush

the heart heeds helplessly—

the hush

of the very good.