Virginia

Windflower, lilac, hyssop –
trisagion of color
planted for the sake
of memory.

Breezes wring anise out
of the blackadder,
send it aloft, a primitive call
to mourners on wings

that pass over our encomium
once, twice, circling
before they land and feed.
They will carry resurrection

with them, as they
drift on the wind,
and your name will live on.

Interior

Humbaba’s sixth aura
was given to the forests;
I read this on the train

and note contrails in the sky
marking off
our path to the city,

with just enough time to scan
a prospectus
on the Lex Ave property.

A weight
presses down
like buildings on Manahata bedrock:

could you dig a hole
deep enough
to find the ghosts of trees?

Some trees are here,
in odd places –
London Plane and Callery Pear

on Stanton and Eldridge.
Small community gardens.
Of course,

Central Park: an island
set in the onrushing
sea of progress.

Humus – trace
of forgotten woods –
far below lifts our feet

as we buy and sell
and breathe air
old as legends.

R.I.P., Jonathan Lambert of Tristan da Cunha

in one month
I will die

in a boat
though I sailed

eight thousand miles
to reach this place

(which is nowhere)
from bustling docks

smelling of salt
cod and sulfur

unfamiliar with irony
nonetheless I will

watch lonely clouds
scud overhead

as every mile
winds backward

and darkens

Studio, 4:37 PM

This mixing the paint—like so.
See? It takes great care.
You stare at this palette for
so long, all the colors look like one,
but no color you’ve seen before.
For this still life, you have a pear,
a cracked dish, an old knife;
you need a delicate glacé of green,
with just enough yellow among
and in-between to make the
fruit soft to the eye’s touch.
A blush of red with the grey
Suggests a warm shadow on
the dish’s scarred face, to make
the anger of the crack
easier to take. And the knife?
Feather black with the steel
and streaks of white; balance
the light and shade, so you
cannot tell whether a tool
of harm or good. You must
say more than dish, knife, pear—
you make a metaphor; ask
why and what for?

When you are done, clean
the brushes well, to be ready
for next time. I’m going down
to lock the door. What more,
how much better
could I tell you?

Jamesport

Twist the lens into place.
Sound: the click of crickets

undisturbed in tall grass.
I photograph old churches,

seek out dusty altars,
amen corners, relics.

Birds nest in cruciform shadows;
they sing to me, prowler,

crouching, bent double,
looking for pools of light.

Copp's Hill

I was tired then,
and did not particularly welcome
the thought of mallet and slab,
the bite of sharp tool into flat,
matte-surfaced stone.

It takes great strength
to carve Agd. 6 Years
onto slate, deep enough
to last through years
of wind and rain,

yet not too deep, so that
the stone will not crack,
so that a child will not lack
a name, a death’s-head,
wings fitted for heaven.

Balance

There are those
who surf on trains--
it happens in Brazil.
They ride, hanging from cars,
balanced on top
of cars, bellowing from
wide-open mouths,
shirts filled with air.
The tracks are waves,
each dip and curve,
bulge and rise
undulating down the length
of the cars.
I saw a rider fall once,
a look of curiosity
shading his face as,
slipping under the surging wheels,
he heard the shriek of brakes,
and then darkness, quiet and sweet like a friend.

Santa Fe

Believing only in trains,
an old woman said

that loss of faith
was like a trail of smoke

that cut the rim of the sky,
dividing heaven and earth,

thick from the belching stack
but spreading thin, then gone,

into a fitful wind.

Theodicy

one kind of
understanding
requires
reasons for
tornadoes
snaking down
from the sky
with a sound
like the hornet
of a vengeful
god and
motion
like a woman
dancing
with death
in her feet

mercies

You hear
a human voice
ever so slightly,
when the train pulls away.

Concealed within
the other sounds –
rolling wheels,
conversations, announcements.

Stand right there
on the platform:
it sings
in a cello’s register,

a single note
like burnished brass,
benediction
for travelers. For you.

luddite

I insist on Polaroids,
although your objections
are valid—
each image a Gaussian smudge,
colors all wrong,
as if under a sea
of green glass.
For me it’s other things:
sweet chemical smell
when the film slides from the camera,
heft of the photo, as if
the image itself adds weight,
wide border white as imagination.

I also ride in horse-drawn carriages.
Just kidding. Now smile.

Saint Augustine

The gutter’s almost black with rust now
(New England winters never let up),
dripping snowmelt onto the pavement
this early and welcome warm day. I have not been able
to forget the spring of last year—
twelve months of walking on clay feet,
struggling to remember voices and faces.

Still waiting for Saint Augustine’s reward,
for the one who died without a word
to call or just come on over, cigarettes in pocket,
letting us in on secrets that none have ever known.
What we have left is the smell
of laundry, incense on special occasions,
the cold-to-hot flow of water over
winter-dried hands — not enough.

A profligate life gave the holy man
enough material to fill books
with gratitude for a life saved.
I would settle for conversion
through evidence
that God is
not finished

tanka 1

traffic lights are out;
the detour takes me by a
man with a worn sign
who reminds me of God’s great
unknowable game of chance

tanka 2

I cover my face
when prayers are offered at meals
so that I can hear,
away deep inside my soul,
the sound of a rushing train.

tanka 5

The corn tastes better
this time of year, close to frost,
before the leaves turn.
Rich yellow oil fills kernels
and makes a mouth sing praises

(small places)

as a child
I dreamed of small places
sleeping in dresser drawers
hiding in cabinets
thinking about tunnels

I loved the story of Moses
how he hid in
a cleft in the rock
behind the hollow
of God’s hand

now
in the city
I lose myself in thought
standing on the subway platform

wondering if I would fit
into the niche
in the tunnel wall

covered by
an unseen hand
while the fury passes by

Omniscient

This is what it means to be all-knowing:
to divine how, at a downtown crossing,

two paths intersect, the walkers never
looking up or slowing, but ever

so slightly, the hems of two garments
brush each other, leaving only hints

of what was not to be a meeting
of two familiars, greeting

each other with a kiss, an embrace,
but only two people in a shared space

with no connection besides your godlike eye,
confident in a marvelous geometry.

foreclosure

I remember the hard
yellow plastic, short,
with a nose like a Viking ship’s prow
and a notched tail,
the cheap urethane wheels –
a Christmas gift that I
stared at for hours before
stepping on, falling off,
repeating, giving up.

Somewhere I watched
slow motion fisheye shots
of bare-chested kids
bombing through empty swimming pools,
flying hair covering their faces
and flowing like the absent water.

Later, there were checkerboard shoes
and corduroy shorts,
Black Flag and learning to ride.

Now it’s brutal
out in the Inland Empire,
a made-up name for the desert,
driving through abandoned
subdivisions – not neighborhoods,
no one ever lived there – dreaming
of things that never happened,
that I could never do,
a hero gliding
above the epic swindle.

Diffusion (for a drowned child)

She simply drifted away,
and that was that.
Linear movement suspended,
no trace of her,

like wine poured in
the ocean, gently spread apart
by rocking waves, thinned
until no longer there,

a libation
to summer
off Coney Island.

shadows
fall in some years
between vows, children, and
death, yet the light will be enough
for us

A Drowning

Late in the year of exits,
we tried to get our minds off spring,
and so drove south toward water,
without a plan, each thinking
about the onrushing shortness
of days, and encroaching cold,
and the need for strong coffee
to make up for our feeling old.

The town stove in long ago,
but the museum held some light,
and we walked from the parked car
with scant hope that there might
be something worth seeing, displays
like we sought in Boston, in better times.
What we found were sailing artifacts,
whale bones, a book of doggerel rhymes.

We looked at the shaving bowl
of a man who went hunting for a shake
of some rare oil, but too late
realized his fatal mistake:
watching the whale dive, he stood
too close to a coil of wet rope,
which took hold of his ankle and pulled him
straight into a gray slope.

Far across the water his grave
was someone in a rundown shack,
waiting for word that never came to
confirm he wasn’t coming back.
She guessed at his fate but
never learned where he had gone,
left only with an impression in a bed,
the absence where a man had been.

Weeks passed outside the curtains, but,
blind to each falling leaf,
she paced the dim, cluttered rooms
hung with the harps of her grief.