Against the Hard Weather
This weather, dry and cold enough
to crack the skin stretched
across hinges of bone, has nothing
to ask from the streets it empties,
the bars and lit stores where
the shivering seek respite or from
a sky so wide and stark
any light turns intruder,
false as promises of eternal love
littered on walls and notebook covers,
spray painted on the water tower
by each year’s senior class, bodies
giddy with the notion of escape.
The only work for those who stay
comes where lights stay on all night:
third shift at the assisted care
center or loading bags
at the tiny airport for those able
to depart. The summer I was
supposed to leave, someone returned
from prison, the name of a girl,
who dumped him months before
he was arrested, inked and needled
into his arm, a sad bit
of love-graffiti, made sadder
by the bouquet of swastikas
garlanding her name. She was gone,
never saw her name blaze
living flesh or heard his longing
spill across conversations,
spoiled, overweight, assuming
a welcome that did not exist.
After a few weeks, he found work
at the rest home, sloshing
water the color of stone across
moon-dull floors and mopping,
nose curled against the blossoming
odor of ammonia, pale perfume
he smelled hours after driving home.
One night at the bar, when the dry
edge of fall felt like rescue,
sleeves rolled down to cover
the name he no longer mentioned,
he told us about a resident—his voice
more deliberate when he said residents—
who had outlived even time, existed
in eternal present tense. On nice days
she walked outside where she stooped
mechanical as a crow, to pick up
pecans scattered over the grass.
She always left her day’s gathering
by the back door, and each morning,
just before light, he walked
the wet grass, scattering her harvest
so there would be something for her
to find. Love is something like that,
its arrival forsaking fire and blood
to bring one piece at a time,
objects that fit the hand or fall
away, all of them alike only
because for a moment we think
they are what we need against
the hard weather longing delivers.
***
Light from Bodies of Dying Fire
We don’t get long to stand under
the
star-throttled dome of sky, to be
breath paused in the heaving chest
of
the world. Centuries burn
above us so completely it is
uncertain
whether the past
or the future turns to ash,
then
ether, above us. The man watching
the sky through his back yard telescope
can
plot the constructs of Scorpio,
recalcitrant Capricorn, even, if he must,
angry
Cancer, but he will not say
how long since his wife’s touch woke him.
The
telescope can focus
on a single star, fill its lens
with
a solitary fire he mistakes
for loneliness, but the sky has
no
loneliness except what belongs
to the man who must rebuild it
each
night. One conceit says
that in death we ascend to find
the
ones we claimed to love
waiting, reconciled. This might
be
true or we might discover
ourselves floating through
the
universe of lost socks, misplaced
phone numbers, the wrong turns
and
unmatched clothes that are
the lunar debris of
lives, particles
unclaimed
and burning away
so rapidly no telescope can
register
them. He recalls the dust
of freckles across her shoulders,
tiny
constellations whose patterns
he loved too well to memorize.
She
floats in the liquid spell
of morphine, a nurse dozing
in
a chair by the bed while
he orbits the room where
he
no longer sleeps before
lying, near dawn, on the couch,
one
portion of sky visible
though he cannot say from where he rests
the
names of the stars he sees
or how long since light started from
those
bodies of dying fire.
***
What Becomes Holy
My first god washed from the sea, a shell,
a
chunk of coral, steady sleeping reminder
of how much of creation must remain
beyond
my reach. My second god was
the knife I used to drill my name into
any
surface that held still. Now,
it is the nameless wren nested so long
in
the limbs of our slow-dying dogwood
I believe it sleeps under my heart,
only
to be startled into motion by any
pitch or cough. Once, the painted eyes
of
the man carved on the cross locked me
in a blind stare I could never outlast.
Noise
came from the choir box, sounds
harder to translate than wren-song.
We
labor to believe in salvation
but have no power to choose
what
becomes holy. The afternoon
two friends and I held our silence for as long
as
it took the sun to set remains
eternal as baptism or birth. The naïve ear
bent
to a shell hears an ocean
vast an empty as sleep, itself
a
kind of god, shapeless and mostly dark.
The passengers dozing on the plane
might
have been praying, so resolutely
were their eyes shut, their bodies upright,
mouths
open as if to admit the holy song
of the wren. Sun eased into
the
curve of the earth, ice-heavy clouds
glowing bright enough to offer
a
brief hope for miracles. What was there
to pray for from that height
but
safe return to the earth
of iron and seed, of water and rust,
but
deliverance from our brief naps
of terror and faith. The sleeping wren’s
single
god is sky, but fear takes it
so far into the hollows and thickets of trees,
it
loses the sky, lights among
invisible branches to wait,
as
any frightened thing must,
for the furies of the blood to subside
into
language finally able
to dream a way into prayer.
***
Report from a Winter Drought
Whatever
my life is, it is
slower
than the ticking heart
of
a watch I no longer wear.
Few
lift their heads after passing
A
half-century and exclaim,
“Here
I am! Right where I meant
to
be,” and I am no exception.
Today,
the great mystery and joy
of
my life kept tugging me
to
my feet for another walk
down
the hall or outside to kick
through
brown leaves and watch cars pass,
engines
and radios bumping
asynchronous
rhythms that seem
designed
to disrupt the heart.
This
is the season of short days,
daytime
too brief to contain
the
energy of not having been
on
this planet long enough
to
know you cast a shadow.
At
night, after sleep claims
the
rest of the house, I listen
to
jazz over my earphones,
following
the reckless path of horns
with
attention I rarely use
anywhere
else. Tonight, they block
the
brush-soft strokes of slow rain,
the
first in weeks. Lake beds have become
tramping
ground for scavengers
hunting
antique fishing tackle
or
fossil proof of what lived
before
us. In the next county,
officials
are coming the shelves
of
school libraries for any books
that
might offend. Last month,
I
showed my daughter the ocean
for
the first time, its unfolding
a
story that won’t stop being written,
blacks
and grays tumbling over
and
over one another like stones
in
a hopper, all the treasures
of
and geographies of the sea floor
hidden,
but I recalled a story
of
the five Chinese brothers, each possessed
of
one unworldly talent. One could
blow
harder than the wind. Another
could
draw and bring the drawing
to
life. The brother I remember could
drink
the ocean dry. He promised
a
boy who begged that he would
empty
the ocean long enough to let
the
boy see what the water hid.
The
boy promised to be watchful
and
to come back at the signal.
Of
course the boy wandered too far,
and
the ocean-drinking brother—
stories
were crueler then—spit
the
ocean back in place,
drowning
the boy. No librarian
would
stock that book today. We want
fiction
of softer consequence.
The
story I want from each day
is
that my daughter has learned
another
work on her walk
into
English, small artifacts
of
breath and sound and, later,
alphabet
arriving to serve her
even
in a world where books
disappear
from library shelves,
where
the past can be slipped
into
a pocket and borne away.
There
are parts of the past I will
wish
to keep hidden from her,
but
she will learn everything
I
don’t want to tell her
as
inevitably as the changing
of
weather. For so many years,
I
longed to know just one thing
for
sure. On walking tours
of
historical sites, tourists linger
by
old jails, seek the gallows,
the
whipping pole. Maybe they want
to
believe themselves safe from
imprisonment
that allows everything
to
be said in the clash of steel
against
steel, erasure that leaves
only
the name, the half-word scrawled
into
a cell wall’s paint. It’s possible
to
stand too long, trying
to
read the end of the message
that
began there or in the splash
and
fall of waves, the empty spaces
on
shelves. Even the soft recitals
of
rain deliver an alphabet. Today,
when
I tried reading to her,
my
daughter, creature of the moment,
seized
the book from my hands
and
laughed, my giggling censor,
my
half-sized future, my unseen
life
continuing.
***
***
