April

I

April Fool’s Day


My mind wanders as I struggle
to read another difficult page.

I’ve not grasped design or intention,
only gathered a spirit
itself not quite decided on the meaning

of certain facts, the content
of a pants pocket, what
of the city is illuminated at dawn

tears, or I should say —emotive sounds
that could be allowing laughter,
spasm, mortality, bliss,
cruelty, affection.

I turn the page nevertheless
to the next

and find one irrefutably tender expression
and remember why I read
and am glad of

another year,
another season,
another day, even as it rains.

II

Survivors


I’m glad, with thirty years’ hindsight, that
they opted not to publish my fiction. It was bad.

I don’t remember which piece it was exactly I’d sent
what magazine, only the envelope that came in reply

torn open to find the ragged paper stock card, a line drawing
cartoon: shaggy dog seated at a typewriter, opening an envelope

and the thin, shaky-hand-written caption that read —
“Rags prepares himself for another character-building experience.”

This has become a part of family idiom over the years, shorthand
for that which we hope is gained from disappointment — repeated,

from heartbreak even. And then there’s the ‘joyful curiosity’ part
— that’s another aspect of the story, how those situations

that promise us risk, pain — we should greet them — joyful,
not frightened, but — curious. Wounds render scar after all, proud flesh.

I think of that wisdom as somehow belonging more to Denise than myself.
I’m not sure why. I suppose, in truth, we share. This life we’ve been living,

not just this past year, demands something of the character we’ve both built.
She has her work. I’ve mine. We’ve each other and that, and our curious joy.

III

The Policeman’s Ball

Loosened hinges on the storm door and its broken latch make for the noise out front the house and the wind. My orbits wear into ruts with routine — still I don’t trust myself to change them. I can’t decide if this room I write in used to be a pantry or not. ‘Dry Goods’ is a title I could conjure to —cotton— to. My daughter lives west of here where the sun hasn’t risen at this hour. If I know my girl she’s still sleeping. There are whole flocks of parrots on the loose in Pasadena. She moved from there, though, to a smaller apartment in Hollywood. Not as glamorous as it sounds. What sleep I managed last night wasn’t sleep — more daydreaming-at-night-like. Something about logistics, family gatherings and performance at the edge of a pit. Eye contact is more than many ever achieve. Would-be confessional poets should stick to their own sins. I seem to know less and less these days, or realize it. More and more. Claiming something for yourself is not the same as loving it. I have friends who seem to enjoy screaming at me and later apologizing. The funny thing is they think I forgive them. No one seems to have truly understood the aging war criminal’s admissions. Not like I did. Does anyone know who I should see about this — or is this as unimportant as I suspect? My country is fascinated with more recent crimes this week. In the right frame of mind obscurity can be a comfort. It’s when Izabella, the dental technician traced my bleeding lips with vaseline that I thought I might finally weep. The neighbor drags another mattress into the alley. From his basement. I’ve lost count.

IV

This poem

This poem, sentence without
a verb, a confession absent sin
or perhaps that’s candor

absent and making no claims, excuses,
accomplishing nothing tangible,
not much in — tangible either

that would justify
the time ill-spent writing it,
reading then or the imaginary ink

of that virtual and monastic
manuscript illumination so
intricately as contrived

an agnostic prayer,
apathetic manifesto,
hapless accusation, or maybe

that’s helpless,
saying only
‘not yet.’

V

Kindness

I notice my own colorless face reflected
off the computer screen gone dark.

It shouldn’t be this difficult to define kindness.

Kindness comes as a way of forgetting
I’m inclined to think — or a forgiveness
conferring sleep finally
to frantic sleeplessness.

Allowances of tender pleasure…

Something changed as the beleaguered young mother watches
eyes wide and waiting as her child tastes vanilla ice cream
for the first time.

Abstaining cruel candor. That tremor in silence.

The wistful eloquence of that message
the dying old woman received from the dying old poet
who’d been her faithless lover was — beautiful—, she said.
So, too, were the warm hands of her hospice nurse.

Those hands upon her feet.

Kindness is not an investment, a transaction, no commerce
is involved. And it shouldn’t be confused with charity
as even that, surrendered to scrutiny, tends to involve
self-dealing.

Light comes spilling down the steep cold hill and touches both our backs.

The good people writing the first dictionary I look to refused the challenge,
opting to simply state that Kindness was that quality of being kind.

VI

Gravity was everywhere then

Remember my panicked messages
how the hands of the clock had slowed
and my theory of planetary physics
had it that we’d soon be floating

off the earth’s surface and into the void:
startled ruminants, automobiles, lake water
and its fishes, ribbons, lawn furniture,
children stepping from their school bus,

the bus itself. I wanted you to know I was thinking
of you, even as we might drift finally, fatally toward different
quadrants of the galaxy. Your replies always came so tender,
so calm. We’ve since learned how different lives can move

different speeds, that this is true almost all the time.
It is only in those heavier times we together mark
that force that holds our feet to the planet.
My love, I’m so thankful, sometimes it’s all I can bear.

VII

Good King

You match his stride
as best you can —
your arms outstretched
for balance,

leaping slightly
from one footprint
in deep, damp snow
to the next.

You’ve this off sense
the tradition’s
just beginning
to wear thin.

It’s always been
that we place these
lamps in the yard,
light the house.

Viewed from the street
by passers-by,
It’s lovely still,
the quaint scene —

wreath on the door
scant glimpse of tree
—artificial,
ornaments.

One lamp bracket
breaks as he stabs
at hardened ground.
He curses.

He is hurried,
gone at all this
distractedly —
mind elsewhere.

You’re there to help
you remind him.
It starts raining —
cold, heavy.

He sends you in
— this last work his
— to finish it
this last time.

VIII

What we learned when we lost the war

That there are things better lost than gained;
Innocence and Ignorance such dangerous cousins.

Time may indeed be money, as it’s claimed,
but there is at least one small hole in every pocket.

I keep thinking of this sheer fabric, so delicate
and white dry in the sunlight,
becoming transparent when laden with rain.

We found our way back from the failed expedition
in search of windfall branches
and only then realized, or admitted, the danger.

I probably made more of things than I should.
Smoke-stung eyes, starlight, laughter
later, by then it was forgot.

What I am not talking about is wisdom
as that word implies acumen, asset of a kind
and this isn’t anything at all like that.

IX

The Age of Fog

Absent real sleep,
it would be mistaken
to think it a dream —
the cold and clear water

refusing my each attempt
for the gravel bottom
of the mountain lake
I see, almost touch

as then my body is taken up,
mist rises from a glassy surface
obscuring a thin surround of shoreline
until that black sun rises. I know it will.

X

Her Things

Each piece of furniture
we took from that house
was marked with at least one
cigarette burn as abject signature
an inch or two in length,
shallow burnt-black troughs
age-darkened shellac raised
at the sides, like scar
or the digger’s discard
beside a ditch.

We carried out boxes of books
each stained volume redolent
of nicotine, caffeine, her scarred, scalded spirit.

Here, I have a cardboard box full of rosaries, dozens,
the kind you might give a child just learning to pray,
each in a neat clear plastic envelope —
her prayer life and charity —years’ collateral.

Long, long ago her father smoked cigars
and she saved the boxes; his eyeglasses
are in one; his teeth another.

One box contains a single yellowed photograph,
its paper is curled, the print surface cracked:

The Old Man stands alone,
he’s in shirtsleeves, wears
a nineteenth-century straw hat —
though, by knowledge of family history,
I reckon the year as 1928 —
and he holds a scythe, though
the ground he stands on is bare dirt.

XI

Broken English

There aren’t always words for the moment,
the warnings and sympathies you ache seeking
to express, that time of day

quiet in the house, its aroma of a bread
unknown in this country, this country —

a particular kind of sadness
only people of an uncertain history experience

that part of the animal never eaten here
knowingly, the word for this instrument something
between a mandolin and a guitar,

blithe tenderness at slaughter, a species
of loving dispassion.

Perhaps I would appear more fluent
were I to avoid thought of these things,

but once you have felt it on your skin, that wind
that comes off the hill at an especially lonesome hour,
you cannot pretend it did not happen.

There are certain lies impossible to tell.

I am not asking for what you call pity
as the only pain involved is your misunderstanding.

There are certain lies impossible to tell.

It is not damage you hear in my voice, I am not broken.
See how even that word fails to mark the truth.

XII

Listen to what you cannot hear

“To gain your own voice
forget about having it heard.”
~ A. Ginsburg

The scientist explained the news
come out of his particle collider
or tried to anyway.

Mathematicians were blindfolded
at one point in the process

and something about the same mistake
they all made convinced them

that there are these less-than particles, other-than
qualities, phenomena that we’d never known
existed before, though some suspected.

They’d weighed the universe
a while back and become convinced
someone else’d been feeding it.

There is actually no such thing as nothingness,
as emptiness, motionless, silent.

Your hand moves, stirs everything
not your hand as it reaches through space.

What it touches is another matter.

Good Catholics all confess what they have done
and what they have failed to do. They always have.

Now, it seems proven, everything ever said or not said
has this shape within what we once called —void,
or silence, or nothing at all.

XIII

Stone Church

I venture no more than a low whisper,
afraid I’ll startle the people of heaven.
~ Li Po

The one stark gable form stands reminder
a roof once sheltered worship there
where, now, sky spills in.

Weed, tough slender stalks of it, and other
softer, finer wild grasses grow
either side of a worn threshold.

Stone masons, so long ago, carved fluted casing
into the dark wall, this coarse granite smoothed
at the small entrance off to one side
of what had been the altar.

My father came forty years ago
driven to the site on his own.
Standing at the doorway, looking in
at what was no longer there, he’d realized
this strange sense of scale, the stature of men
a thousand years — five hundred generations — back.

I think he said it was raining, cold, the wind was up.
Telling me, he always tried to capture the mix
of comedy and awe. History. Absent tracing
the doorframe his hand had found one place smoother
— more polished than the rest —

where so many had touched the stone that same place
as softly, just as elsewhere-minded as he was, fixed or trying
to fix on prayer in whatever language, the blessings
of different years, saint names, grief and its rote consolations

— or only steadying themselves as they stepped across
a width of stone the color of pale flesh, wet with rain.

XIV

Wake before the others

The matchstick lit
and fallen in
the tent of dry tinder
and boney stick
you’d thought would light
effortlessly
and burn and burn, blaze
instead
flares out, sputters
pale wisps
white and grayish blue,
undulant
threads of black.
Bend down and face
the stinging smoke.
Again and again, you must
as its your breath
that brightens what fire
there is
and the others are waking.

XV

I am sorry to tell you

It has shoved me out of the nest.
The poem is finished.
~ Tomas Tranströmer

‘nd what if I told you differently?
— that no matter the provider’s prowess
there’ll be the obligatory shortcomings?

Distended bellies of smoke slow-drift and drag
heavily across the elegant pavement
where our neighbors are surprisingly well armed.

The different histories arranged on my bookshelf
attain a strangely somber syncopation
of complaint, flawed pride, prayer.

Several of our more ghastly wars were begun
as the last ever — rape for chastity’s sake.
Though my devices are dark at the moment,

indicator lights assure me signal.
Most of us require, simply, eyes to meet our own.
The flash and pulse of minuscule stars

in this dim space, pale green and so softly glowing.
Poems are never finished, they are abandoned.
That’s a quote I could attribute to a famous poet;

but I’d rather pretend I heard it in a barroom
in 1986, Boston — Beacon Hill before
it ever became what it is now.

XVI

Insomnia
after Tranströmer

And sleepless season arrives
smoke-like, darkness
sting’s my mind’s eye
without apology.

The only things worth keeping
are quite invisible.

I attend my own emptiness
like a large mirror
in the smallest room of an abandoned house.

The only thing I have going for me
is the easy way the wrecking crew’s distracted
—like wild children they are—
distracted by the music of wind at a gaping hole.

XVII

Elegy for a teacher

I learned of his death four years after it happened
and his obituary disappointed.
I’d hoped for details — not on his death, his life.

He’d once told me his name was an alias
and that he’d written an important book.
I wonder, now, if he was lying then, playfully
perhaps — or pedagogically.

There was no mention of a double life
in his final write-up, nothing to competently explain
his heavy, accented speech or his fascination
with freedom and its antitheticals — his odd, coy sense of humor.
It simply described him an avid citizen in a happy democracy.
The conventional scholar and his community, family, a fondness
for antique technology, old typewriters especially, history and design.

That last time I saw him — he was first to congratulate me on finally defending my difficult thesis project — I sat, leaned against a wall, exhausted
and he set down next to me, told me, just then, smiling
— Now — you should start all over again.

XVIII

Periods

They’ve become more plain
a point of emphasis
of late. You’ll see them placed, not
ending a sentence, but
marking each word in a phrase
perhaps you should’ve
understood the first time —

Understood. The. First. Time.

The technique’s reminiscent
of ancient interpunct
meant to make a little more
comprehensible
the Latin scriptio continua.

In those days all text was scribed
in capital letters
— and these were not intended
to convey shouting —necessarily—
words flowed one to the next
without space between them

until these small marks
introduced first in monumental
inscription, official documents
so’s to brook no mis—
interpretation

and there were those resistant,
of course, who lamented advent
of these distracting marks,
the loss of freedom to parse a text
in the quiet of a reader’s mind,

to take a cup to the flowing stream
and drink what one would —

IXX

Patt’s Pick-Ur-Own

Daniel, Daniel, he is almost singing.
The row upon row of blueberry bushes
at the perfect point for picking.

Sunlight has the berries warm and sweet
on the tongue, comb from the branches
in fistfuls, and fall into our old coffee-tin
buckets in plush, musical syncopations.

Daniel has come with his father
at our urging and his rapture validates
these pleasures we’d proselytized:

picking this fruit, this woodland-secluded
acreage, a suddenness of summer sky
the short walk from the roadside stand,
barely path to move among the ample bushes.

Now, Daniel narrates a dramatic scene he’s envisioned:
returned home to his mother, his bucket brimming,
he has her announcing his name, thrilled and listing
the many things she’ll make with the blueberries:

Oh, Daniel! Blueberry Pies! Blueberry muffins!
Daniel! Blueberry pancakes with blueberry syrup
to put on those blueberry pancakes! Oh, Daniel! Daniel!

His name, in her voice as he portrays it, echoing,
ringing up at the blue sky, to every delirious corner
of his universe, from somewhere out in the bushes overgrown.
Oh, the glorious purposes a blueberry can fulfill.

XX

Time Signature

That look of chagrin
will never come off your face
or it might
and oh-so-slowly turn into a smile

holding the one end
of the thread you pulled
from the ravel.
Maybe it’s best you let go.

It’s a delicate gesture, actually,
the one moment you have it
between your thumb and index finger
and the next you don’t.

But then I’ve never been one
for keeping time, stopped
quite a while back.

XXI

The Future

Found among his personal effects,
it wasn’t a suicide note, exactly;
more like a poem preminiscing his death.

This was considered noteworthy, even suspicious
by those investigating, until it was uncovered
that he’d been writing these for years;

sometimes plain about his fears,
at other times so subtle as to be obscure.
Even a broken clock has the correct time, eventually.

XXII

Norman’s aluminum boat

It’s hull to the sun, shining, scalding
to the touch — I learned by
that bright silver flash of pain,
my burnt hand on its blinding skin.

A bite like I’d woken it sleeping
at the pond edge
—wild, angry — especially at me.
That sting, that boat, I took it personal, willful

the way, out on the water, it would rock and sway
as I tried to stand or move about;
I was seed in its writhing mouth
that it meant to find and spit.

The spare black mites of grit
afloat in the clear bilge at its bottom,
that shallow, wincing light.

I remember watching it
sink close to shore
that one time.
Slow and stubborn, resisting
my brothers’ attempts to right and bail it,
how it surrendered to my father’s
brute drag at last up onto the grass-bald banks.

He stood it upright and the water spilled out.
Then he laid it again in the sobering sun.

XXIII

Confession

If I am to be honest, which I assume would be good,
I can’t quite manage disdain for the old ways,
the established church

—yes, I realize the flaws, abuses, hypocrisy.
It’s just I can’t reach for that first stone.

I don’t know that I can account for what I believe
or don’t believe either.

It’s more than a year since I’ve taken the sacrament,
seated myself behind the old, frail man, who moves
so slowly, cautiously, persisting
against his pains
each time we are told to extend to one another
some sign of peace; I don’t know him —
only this gesture.

Each time he turns and faces me, smiles
and reaches out his hand, I think of the church
that has brought me this holiness.

It hasn’t the proper name of any particular saint,
those it uses for god are doubtless mistaken
—or at least confused. I still pray somehow.

XXIV

House Guests

I’d lost the key given me long ago,
never locked the door, myself.
By then there was nothing to keep

and that — that was in ample supply.
At different hours you’d hear them
move about the house, never

carefully, like they knew full well
they’d run of the place as welcome
guests as anyone, at any hour.

Just before sunrise was the sweetest:
a few birds offering their early noise
at the opened window and I’d sense
these children waking.

XXV

“Some part of art is the art of waiting”

“…like a star you might see
in broad daylight
if you thought to look up.”

~ Ted Kooser
in Four Civil War Paintings by Winslow Homer

I told her my mind had changed, I might
have said ‘brain,’ that it was my brain different.

Maybe it’s hardware, maybe software,
I can’t quite say, but I do notice

in the work I’ve been doing — you know
what we call work — the best I can describe it:

I’m not ready to give anyone an argument,
not like I once was, and I might never again.

It’s hard to say whether this is diminished
capacity or wisdom at work in me, age or light.

We’d circled the same abandoned building
we’ve walked around four times every morning

for a year. Winded after that part of the path steepest.
I worry — only worry if I’ve somehow worried her.

XXVI

Experiments With Silence

All that wisdom talk about silence
I’d heard, I thought I should
call its hand. I’d hang a blank canvas
and call that art. Celebrate the emptiness.

What I once feared, I’d face it, stone
cold and quiet, as if that were more honest.
Songs I’d sung I’d un-sing them
sat back in a darker seat.

When asked to, I’d explain with a smile
that my voice’d deteriorated, or my hearing
improved, and that there were other singers
and songs enough without me,

my obscure lyrics, problematic delivery.
It’s that there are already too many poets
and not enough listeners, I said, I lied, doubt
that I’ll ever really learn to listen.

XXVII

Advice to the reader

I’d suggest you not read this
like it was actually addressed to you.

Take this as something intercepted, unscripted,
if at all coherent or candid, inadvertently.

It’s best understood as an artifact,
leaving of a lost civilization, a culture of one
and a crude one at that.

If you find me offering advice, skepticism
would be in order. Take everything
I say with a grain of salt
—or is that sand you ought to sift?

And, if I do somehow speak to you, know
that I take no credit — you deserve that

and all praise for finding, feeling
what I’ve asked you to feel,

wished for you, honestly,
seeing past my eyes to what I’ve seen.

XXVIII

To Hannah

after L. Cohen

It’s early in the morning, the last days
of April. I write you now that
the weather’s improving.
Spring’s seeming late this year,
the skies have been darker.
You’ll not come back here, I know.

Those songs I collected
that insulted California,
they were never intended
to change your mind.

I’m told that you wept last time you called.
Another courageous decision you made.
What can I tell you that you don’t already know?
Courage is rough on the brave.

I see you there with the flowers and light
that you’ve found, your drive across the desert
your lover beside you — what more could I wish for you?
— what more could I give?

I’m thinking of another song right now
born out of a more complicated love than mine.
It’s just that sometimes it’s easier
to misappropriate a line
even as it guesses wrong colors
—how I — miss and — forgive you,
can confess of my faults,
how with that off my chest I could send this
without the slightest grain of salt.

Those songs I collected
that insulted California,
they were never intended
to change your mind.

IXXX

Her “Envelope Period” and then

In the one piece she’d placed odd tokens
she’d found, herbs, feathers, buttons, coins,
placed these in folded vellum pouches
touched with something that sealed
and made each more transparent.

Tied together with string, hung in the light
like a luminous curtain. There was the sense
of precious capture. Amber. Paler though.
More delicate than that.

Another involved hundreds of these envelopes
in a heavier brown construction paper this time.
More opaque. Inside, on a small slip of paper
like you’d find in a fortune cookie, one of my haiku.
I’d written one each morning for several years,

gave her a box of these small ‘fortunes’ once as a gift.
More a blanket than a curtain, this “poetry wall”
hung on a wall outside her studio for a time.
These envelopes were not sealed closed.
Take a poem, read it, put it back.

The elderly priest who painted in the studio next
to hers: large canvases depicting the blood
and fire befalling the damned on Judgement Day;
he noted that many of the poems he read were “dark.”

But I’m thinking of Denise’s work here — right.
She moved on from her ‘Envelope Phase’ a while ago,
paints now — sometimes on canvas, sometimes panel.
Lately larger work, she’ll find these shapes—
membraned surfaces, layered patterns, countless points
of color attaining larger forms, that kind of reading.

XXX

Errata, etc.

somewhat after Simic

No one, as yet, comes forward
with peer-reviewed science
to refute or support these claims.

I should have mentioned their dog.

Where I said ‘quite’ I meant — entirely
in much the same way somewhat more than a little
actually means — a great deal.

Knowledge of classical culture and history
has been simulated for dramatic effect.

Meaning no disrespect, I really did hate that boat.

Saints, very specific flowers, geographies,
and the names of fellow parishioners were withheld
for reasons that cannot now be disclosed.

The following words were not able to find purchase
anywhere in the manuscript and are asked to report
for reassignment:

purchase, bacciferous, guffaw,
municipal, heartbreak, migratory, migration,
migrant, cunning, cantaloupe, denture,
denigration, Schenectady, NY, simulacrum,
somnambulant, operetta, rubato,
tangerine, cruciform, hydrangea
disingenuous, and lather.

Also, if you see Norman, please do explain
it was nothing personal toward — him.

You would recognize the man by his taste in neckties—
wide… loud… unfortunate color sense.

Self-pity is not a complaint.

This morning, sleepless in the dark,
I heard her say my name, that’s enough.