"Young Wife Waiting for the Results of Her Husband's Biopsy"

1

She crushes a paper coffee cup
in her lap. (This can't be happening.)
Nurses murmur. (She remembers her grandmother's
shadow murmuring, shades drawn, a rosary
rolling over her hands.) A thousand miles away
from this bright place, her parents, his parents
wait for her call. She tugged the cord
as she told them. Just last week
she ground up fresh French roast at home
with him, stirring
a cinnamon stick in. Its tight scroll
unraveled on their tongues, its taste unrolled.

2

This morning she smelled the cut
grass blowing past
the man next door as he mowed his lawn.
He has lived there so long.
At noon his wife will shake moist lettuce
in the shade and call him
into that cool place.

Moonburn

I stayed under the moon too long.
I am slivered with lust.
Dreams flick like minnows
through my eyes.
My voice is trees tossing in
the wind.
I lose myself like a flock of blackbirds
storming into your face.
My lightest touch leaves blue
prints,
bruises on your mind.
Desire sandpapers your skin
so thin I read the veins and
arteries
maps of routes I will travel
till I lodge in your spine.
The night is our fur.
We curl inside it licking.

The Spaces Between

It hurts
when love dies.
When love is deep
it hurts deeply
more deeply maybe than you thought
anything would ever hurt
again.

But with time
the spaces between the moments when it hurts
get longer
the moments themselves become
less devastating
till eventually you come to associate them
with a sad sweetness
that has as much in common with love
as it does with grief.

I will not say
Don’t grieve for me—
do I look like Saint Francis?

But I wish you long
spaces between,
and may you carry into them
all of that sweetness
and only enough sadness to attest

the risk that’s being taken
by everyone who loves you.
Every time we love we’re saying,
Let it ride
and what’s on the table
is the rent money.

And every time we stride again
out into the crisp desert night
our fists shoved deep into empty pockets
we know ourselves for losers.

But, Jesus,
what brave losers we are.
I wish you this too,
for the spaces in between,
this bravery.

Viridian

what is your favorite color?
you never told me.
today i am wearing a green i like to call Viridian.
whatever the color of the day
i grandly designate it -
to myself of course-
as your favorite.
you would probably agree
because it is my body in these colors.

Poem no. 3

I gather up
each sound
you left behind
and stretch them
on our bed.
                Each night
I breathe you
and become high.

The Lightkeeper

A night without ships. Foghorns called into walled cloud, and you
still alive, drawn to the light as if it were a fire kept by monks,
darkness once crusted with stars, but now death-dark as you sail inward.
Through wild gorse and sea wrack, through heather and torn wool
you ran, pulling me by the hand, so I might see this for once in my life:
the spin and spin of light, the whirring of it, light in search of the lost,
there since the era of fire, era of candles and hollow-wick lamps,
whale oil and solid wick, colza and lard, kerosene and carbide,
the signal fires lighted on this perilous coast in the Tower of Hook.
You say to me stay awake, be like the lensmaker who died with his
lungs full of glass, be the yew in blossom when bees swarm, be
their amber cathedral and even the ghosts of Cistercians will be kind to you.
In a certain light as after rain, in pearled clouds or the water beyond,
seen or sensed water, sea or lake, you would stop still and gaze out
for a long time. Also when fireflies opened and closed in the pines,
and a star appeared, our only heaven. You taught me to live like this.
That after death it would be as it was before we were born. Nothing
to be afraid. Nothing but happiness as unbearable as the dread
from which it comes. Go toward the light always, be without ships.

For my daughter

When I die choose a star
and name it after me
that you may know
I have not abandoned
or forgotten you.
You were such a star to me,
following you through birth
and childhood, my hand
in your hand.

When I die
choose a star and name it
after me so that I may shine
down on you, until you join
me in darkness and silence
together.

He wishes for the cloths of heaven

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly, because you tread on my dreams.

Silent Manners

Before you invest in a book on manners,
Better make sure it contains a chapter
On keeping silent, one to remind you,
When you pull off on the shoulder
Of a country road to ask directions,
Not to ask the elderly man in overalls,
Who crosses the field to greet you,
Why he isn't wearing a hat on a day so sunny.
If the sun has deepened the ruts in his face,
It's too late now to stop it, the chapter reasons,
And why remind him how much he's aged?

And if you notice blood-vessel cobwebs
Beneath his eyes—for you a sure sign of drinking
Over many years—the same chapter will warn you
Not to suggest, however gently, that help
Is available if he wants to stop. Who knows
What escape you might have tried
If you'd had his worries:
The flooding and drought and heavy mortgage,
The doctor's bills he'll never see the end of.

Some Extensions on the Sovereignty of Science

The smallest muscle in the human body is in the ear.
It is also the only muscle that does not have blood vessels;

It has fluid instead. The reason for this is clear:
The ear is so sensitive that the body, if it heard its own pulse,

Would be devastated by the amplification of its own sound.
In this knowledge I sense a great metaphor,

But I do not want to be hasty in trying to capture or describe it.
Words are our weakest hold on the world.

“Poem to be read at 3 a.m.”

Excepting the diner
On the outskirts.
The town of Ladora
At 3 a.m.
Was dark but
For my headlights
And up in
One second-story room
A single light
Where someone
Was sick or
Perhaps reading
As I drove past
At seventy
Not thinking.
This poem
Is for whoever
Had the light on

The Fist

The fist clenched round my heart
loosens a little, and I gasp
brightness; but it tightens
again. When have I ever not loved
the pain of love? But this has moved

past love to mania. This has the strong
clench of the madman, this is
gripping the ledge of unreason, before
plunging howling into the abyss.

Hold hard then, heart. This way at least you live.

Before

Before you were you,
before your bicycle appeared under the street-lamp,
before you met me at the airport in a corduroy jacket,

before you agreed to hold my five ballpoint pens
while i ran to play touch football,
before your wet hair nearly touched the piano keys

and in advance of how your raincoat was tightly cinched
when you asked about nonviolent anti-war activity
and before you said "Truffaut,"

before your voice supernaturally soft sang
"I aweary wait upon the shore,"
before you suddenly stroked my thigh in the old Volvo,

when you had not yet said "Marcus Aureliius at 11:15"
and before your white shirt on the train,
before Pachelbel and "My Creole Belle"

and before your lips were so cool under that street-lamp
and before Buddy Holly in Vermont on the sofa
and Yeats in the library lounge,

prior to your denim cutoffs on the porch,
prior to my notes and your notes
and before your name became a pulsing star,

before all this
ah safer and smoother and smaller was my heart.

Rain

With thick strokes of ink the sky fills with rain.
Pretending to run for cover but secretly praying for more rain.

Over the echo of the water, I hear a voice saying my name.
No one in the city moves under the quick sightless rain.

The pages of my notebook soak, then curl. I’ve written:
“Yogis opened their mouths for hours to drink the rain.”

The sky is a bowl of dark water, rinsing your face.
The window trembles; liquid glass could shatter into rain.

I am a dark bowl, waiting to be filled.
If I open my mouth now, I could drown in the rain.

I hurry home as though someone is there waiting for me.
The night collapses into your skin. I am the rain.

Eating Poetry

Ink runs from the corners of my mouth.
There is no happiness like mine.
I have been eating poetry.

The librarian does not believe what she sees.
Her eyes are sad
and she walks with her hands in her dress.

The poems are gone.
The light is dim.
The dogs are on the basement stairs and coming up.

Their eyeballs roll,
their blond legs burn like brush.
The poor librarian begins to stamp her feet and weep.

She does not understand.
When I get on my knees and lick her hand,
she screams.

I am a new man.
I snarl at her and bark.
I romp with joy in the bookish dark.

People Like Us

There are more like us. All over the world
There are confused people, who can't remember
The name of their dog when they wake up, and
people
Who love God but can't remember where

He was when they went to sleep. It's
All right. The world cleanses itself this way.
A wrong number occurs to you in the middle
Of the night, you dial it, it rings just in time

To save the house. And the second-story man
Gets the wrong address, where the insomniac lives,
And he's lonely, and they talk, and the thief
Goes back to college. Even in graduate school,

You can wander into the wrong classroom,
And hear great poems lovingly spoken
By the wrong professor. And you find your soul
And greatness has a defender, and even in death
you're safe.

For the Sake of Strangers

No matter what the grief, its weight,
we are obliged to carry it.
We rise and gather momentum, the dull strength
that pushes us through crowds.
And then the young boy give me directions
so avidly. A woman holds the glass door open,
waits patiently for my empty body to pass through.
All day it continues, each kindness
reaching toward another - a stranger
singing to no one as I pass on the path, trees,
offering their blossoms, a retarded child
who lifts his almond eyes and smiles.
Somehow they always find me, seem even
to be waiting, determined to keep me
from myself, from the thing that calls to me
as it must have once called to them -
this temptation to step off the edge
and fall weightless, away from the world.

On pain

Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses
your understanding.

Even as the stone of the fruit must break, that its
heart may stand in the sun, so must you know pain.

And could you keep your heart in wonder at the
daily miracles of your life, your pain would not seem
less wondrous than your joy;

And you would accept the seasons of your heart,
even as you have always accepted the seasons that
pass over your fields.

And you would watch with serenity through the
winters of your grief.

Much of your pain is self-chosen.

It is the bitter potion by which the physician within
you heals your sick self.

Therefore trust the physician, and drink his remedy
in silence and tranquility:

For his hand, though heavy and hard, is guided by
the tender hand of the Unseen,

And the cup he brings, though it burn your lips, has
been fashioned of the clay which the Potter has
moistened with His own sacred tears.

Why a man cannot have wings

Because he is lonely enough without being able to
Frame the house he lives in between his forefinger and thumb.

Landing

What death may be: a slow, close-to-weightless
tilt, like a burgeoning foetus turning
slightly in the womb. The engine starts a low
growl like a stomach, the aircraft hungry to
land, to devour the space between its
falling body and the ground, followed by
the slow lick of its wheels against the runway's
belly: pressing down, then skating forward,
only to decelerate, a sensual slow-mo,
and the plane makes a sound
like the hugest sigh of relief.

The seatbelt sign blinks off for the final time.
We rise up from our seats like souls
from bodies, leaving bulky hand luggage
in the overhead compartments, then
begin a tense line down the aisle, awkwardly
smiling at each other, remaining few minutes
alive with all kinds of ambivalences,
or simply relief at having arrived, at long last,
in that no-time zone of a country
without a name except the ones we give it;
weeping, laughing, both at once.

...

And so I wait for you like a lonely house.
  Until you will see me again. 
    And live in me. 
          Until then 
              my windows ache.

CROSSWORDS

I write to bring you closer. To imagine your fingers
trailing the curve of my spine. To recall
how the span of your hands were exactly
the width of my hips. And how our bodies would fall
like words on a crossword puzzle.
I write for the raw ache in my bones when the ink
seeps into paper - for the bittersweet sorrow that
comes from bringing you back.