or tanks
converging on the Volga.
Of course he wrote that date
knowing,
though he didn’t know what.
Manzanar
You, here,
any child
lungs crackling like Christmas boughs
fired by shivering air.
Barbed peaks east and west
fence this morning’s glare,
on cottonwoods’ bare bones
scraps of black birds sway.
Others, sparked from sage
whirl outward, then slow to soar
on deep currents of wind
over you and away, far
and far away.
The Black Bathing Suit
Our uncle hauls on the black bathing suit
once or twice a summer
limps to the shore, a swayback stork
on soft feet, and dips his pale flesh
in the little blue lake of his youth
breasting the wavelets, then submerging
slow as a capsizing battleship.
We children look at each other.
What’s it doing here, that bathing suit?
It’s out of place in the chaste north woods
a thin black band between
skinny legs and the vast boulder of his belly
revealing more than we want to know
about the genitals of fiftyish Grand Rapids
piano-playing church usher tax accountants.
But memory won’t let him discard it
for some baggy nod to the modern.
Faithfully, once or twice a year
he pulls it on and marches to the water’s edge,
lets the northern cold climb his thighs
and shock his cringing privates,
and cross the black horizon that severs
Hawaiian sands from the darker surf
of Okinawa and after.
III. We
One for Judith
A stockade
of buildings guards this small
courtyard, forcing a cold
wind up and over, through
the tops of the old
talking trees that shade it;
one whole side a wall
of jasmine where
just one of those white stars
glows at me with
inexplicable light.
Below Venus
Of time separating us
there’s nothing yet.
But the space between us
does grow and shrink
each day, a slow breathing.
As the pale planet
climbs to the black
above the dawn, you sink
below that same stained
mirror to the underground
and slide away from me.
From a dark room
I watch your train burrow
through a maze of tunnels,
then surface and roll south,
fleeing its own trail of cries;
while below Venus
the silent planes rise
one by one, turn northward
and disappear.
Memory Foam
Making the bed, I find the faint
imprints of our parallel forms
hollowing the soft foam.
The mattress is no longer new;
perhaps its long-term memory
is starting to harden, like our own,
fixing our story in these
shallow Pompeiian voids.
Turn it over, then. After all,
with the right instruments
I might also find molecules
of the water and carbon dioxide
we exhaled last night,
and a slightly elevated temperature
still tingling in that clever matrix.
Who cares? I don’t need.
any witness of mere matter
to remind me I could touch
your hand or foot any time
on any of those warm nights;
or of where we’ve been for all
these years, and where
for now we still are.
Late Summer
A causeway, this band
of warm pavement
this day unfurling
across the ridges
under a flock of clouds.
On one side fallow fields
busy with hasty wings;
on the other deepest woods
and one peewee.
Your hand please. Let’s walk.
Our footsteps’ metronome
marks a stand of pines,
a barn with leaks of sky
through weathered walls,
a silent stone house.
An empty clothesline
sways in the stream of air.
Once and for all,
immutable, this wind,
this road, these fields
your hand my hand
(though for one of us
this morning in the end
will be just a sweet dream
that never heals).
To the Church Street Station
Clouds tipped pink
there will be
weather as planned
it is trash
collection day
the streets
junk-piled
self-important
pigeons waddle
amid desk chairs
printers raveling
balls of pasta
plastic spoons
(I have your hand)
not since Franklin
Delano Roosevelt
incumbent sun
seven point two
jobs double dip
and blackbirds stand
at the entrance
down you go
but if as planned
the sloshing tide
you’ll be back
a million people
once in Rome
too and now
again so
I don’t care
about all that
(I have your hand)
Piano, Falling
Not one of those out-of-tune
tinkling crates of the old saloons
tobacco- and sweat-stained keys
no; or my mother’s flat
matter-of-fact old upright
where my sister sat
for years, shackled to her scales
or even my uncle’s baby grand
with all its memories still tingling
Träumerei, Southern Roses
no. To wind up our story
we’ll have a truly grand
greater than grand, a falling
angel big enough to level
a whole city block
no mistakes. No dear
we came to this ball alone
but we’ll leave together
somehow, hand in hand
accompanied by a sweet old tune
taking our own sweet time
with us.
IV. Life and Death
Object Lesson
“Look!” my mother said.
I was three or four,
the lake was still
the huge gleaming
gem of childhood.
Underneath the log
I’d teetered across
a hundred times
the frog was dead
in the water, wound
in fertile gauze
and floating in a fog
of softest green.
My mother was not
shivered or shocked
but thrilled by the clever
protocol of rot.
“Mother Nature never
wastes a thing!”
she said. Under the log
the dead frog rocked
on glassy ripples,
eyelids shuttered to
h
er dream of meaning.
Counting to 32,639
Having out of long habit drawn
your night’s supply of breath
you remembered yourself at dawn
and decided it was time to go.
Who wants to leave a day half done?
Once the jay spears the morning
with his first demand it’s too late
or the first breeze annoys
the night-polished lake
it’s too late. You might
have to wake and stay
for one more round.
And then perhaps you dreamed
your own small silence would drown
in that deeper pause – last night
poised in silver pools
before the dark began to drain away.
After She’s Gone
It seems the afternoon could last forever,
the tireless breeze and flit of birds
across this still and perfect pool of weather.
The wind chime stops, and starts, and gropes for words;
unperturbed, the afternoon replies
in tireless breeze and flit of birds.
The sun is stalled; the hours lie
light on the grass. And when the wind chime tolls,
unperturbed, the afternoon replies.
Poised on this frontier, the day unrolls
a slow, recursive reverie, sifting
light on the grass. Each time the wind chime tolls
we circle back, our recollections shifting,
as if the afternoon could last forever,
this slow, recursive reverie, drifting
across the still and perfect pool of weather.
Madame du Barry
...and though we know
or think we know
won’t we all
on that high stage
with the rough hand on our neck
say, or want to say
but Sir
just one moment yet?
Old Friends
That impassive clock
across the room – take that down
and in its place please hang
the drawing of my face
and shoulders round with muscle
long ago. I’ll just sit still
here in the gauze of sound
that floats up from below:
horns and sirens, dear bustle
of common day.
Yes “Mom.”
I know you have to go.
It’s still too hard to say
out loud how tired I really am.
But curl your arm around
my shoulders, and let me
rest my head this once
against your hair.
You’ve sailed all the way
from the western sea
to bring me home. So you
I will show.
And now get the hell out of here.
Leave the rest to me.
Twilight, Mono Craters
I think this wind must pour
from that tilted moon
all down a sky still light,
over ash and obsidian curves
already drowned by night:
this night, so deep for me,
but not for the pines that moan
its song; this wind so old,
but owned indifferently
by bats that swerve and soar.
Fire Season
I.
A molecule from the sky
and one from the earth.
A drop of sunlight.
Repeat.
And repeat.
Plodding decades piled
two hundred feet high.
II.
The tick of falling needles.
A twig vibrates
with vanished warbler.
III.
Today, the mountain
yesterday, the mountain.
The same mountain the day before
I was born.
On the mountain, an old tree
and the shadow of the tree
tracing an arc through the long day.
Tomorrow the same tree
and the same arc.
The day I die, and the day after
the mountain and the same tree
and its shadow.
IV.
Strike a match
The Big Burn
Italian stone pine
sifting the morning air
on this breezy hillside,
your calm seems to belong here
always. So it hurts
to think of that stillness
some distant year
gone up in smoke.
But even for today,
what of the million mites
warbler-picked from your bark,
the warbler borne away
and torn by the hawk,
the hawk crumpled in some ditch,
lunch for a million ants?
Their flickering forms
are no less real
than any millennial grove
burned black and overrun
by jackpines – all of us
thoughtless pyrophytes,
and all creation just one
rolling wildfire.
X-treme Camping
It’s a good way to get to know the country.
Hiking, climbing, there’s always motion
and a goal to distract you.
The landscape recedes and grows,
the cliffs and peaks march by
while you drum your feet on the trail,
ignoring the sky and planning
where to spend the night. But try this:
Place your hand beneath a boulder
and leave it there for five days.
Now you can begin to learn.
Fixed in space, at once you feel
the flow of time across your skin.
You discover how the canyon’s shadow
gets from west to east, and savor
the endless gossip of water.
You feel yourself rolled
on the tall wheel of night,
discover the many failures of ants
and the value of a well-made chair.
The hurrying seconds slow and stroll
past your privileged perch;
you can load each one with visions
of beds, restaurants, and helicopters.
Meanwhile, the evolving perfume
of your own waste
will remind you to stay alive.
Thirst will finally inspire you to tie off
this flood of wisdom and be on your way.
But leave an offering to the blessed boulder
that has taught you so much
as we all must leave our blunders and blinders
our bloody diplomas littering
the converging trails of the world.
The Herring Net
This is West Branch, the usual freeway
rest stop, hundreds of miles from the sea;
so how did that water color invade this prairie air?
Sunlight here seems caged between earth and sky,
aged and frustrated. All these glints and gleams –
flash of fender, windshield, mirror –
could be helmetshine or jostling shards of waves,
or silver curves of herring in the net. And what could be
distant sails are just our dreams, hull down.
West Branch, as always, a little more than south
but less than north. Flatness for now is past.
Hot blasts of wind draw the land up into waves,
and in their troughs lie the lakes; not the blue spills
they will be farther north, but dull tea,
detained by careless arms of green. Here are
the old scarred tables under third-growth oaks,
the gargling urinals; but new crops of children,
hu
nched over, poking at their palms,
and parents addressing the air with faraway eyes
while their dogs dot the clipped and watered lawns.
And here are we, too, drawn up
from our cars into the puzzle of the present,
netted by this doubtful light.
Flash Mob
Was it May or June?
In the morning we sowed potatoes,
chopping them down to their eyes
and burying those in plowed soil.
All around, the forest strained at its leash.
Branches swayed in sunlight,
birds sang in a fever. In the afternoon
the toads appeared in thousands
from somewhere – the woods or the grass,
or maybe from the earth itself.
The force of all the living drove
against us like a desert river:
the yelling of the maddened toads,
jellied strings of eggs criss-crossing
the pond bottom’s velvet mud,
our dabbling bare feet as desirable
as any warty seductress in that scrum.
A few dismayed green frogs scrambled
weakly, like tourists in a war zone.
The party din and splash continued
far into the night under a sinking moon
while we dreamed behind our walls,
wearied by pasta and spirits.
In the morning the toads were gone.
The pond was a sacked city, ruins
picked over by the dazed and listing frogs.
Below ground, unblinking
potato eyes peered into the dark.
Bottleneck
In that zone everything has happened
or will happen, but nothing happens now.
The tireless brook spreads its cloth of sparks
on the lake, over footprints of wind.
All through the monotone afternoon
cumulus stand sentinel; the junco
chips from her hemlock.
Trees are fallen, but never fall,
and though we wheel hopefully
toward the crack of tumbling rock,
the slides are always still,
angled just so. Mountains
rising and falling, glaciers
flickering across earth’s story,
all must freeze, to squeeze through
this bottleneck, my afternoon:
the brook striking sparks
from the lake’s dark steel,
the junco rocking in her rag of hemlock,
chipping at the wind.
V. Around Home
Prison Break
I spotted Alcatraz today
steaming toward the Golden Gate
to make her escape:
sluggish galley turning