Our Vanishing Unfinished Heaven

Was there something

you thought

you needed to do

one more time?

What small act

was it

you thought

didn’t matter?

—still in the thrall of Jane Hirshfield

Coma

   

I said          I knew

you were in there          and whole.


I said          I wouldn't

let them take you          away.


Regret is a tide.


At the top of the field          never again

will I leave you          alone.

Assimilation in a Pandemic

   

The news keeps coming

          with its one crooked

finger


          death   death   death   death   death


And one no longer turns at the call of her name,

and another forgets to lift his surprised eyebrow.


While here are the leopard frogs,

                    and the leopard frog descendants,

          eeking and leaping and wagging their slippery tails

inside the folds of the still living pond.

—an assimilation of Jane Hirshfield's "A Folding Screen"  

Reading with Jane

   

Phase of the moon

too easily forgotten

in the days of the cull

wet snow like a spew

lying as rain

flooding the stones

as coffins were stacked

and the market recovered

reading with Jane at the window

March near its end

surprised every time

love started and stopped

when so much continued

when so much did not.

–with lines by Jane Hirshfield

Decapiitism

We were getting ready to be gone,

singing the death of the earth,

chanting the system in flames,

what it does to us,

our otherness,

the contagion raising the cost

and the profit,

fewer,

fewer.

–with a few words from Nathaniel Mackey in "The Paris Review" #232

Wanderer Sheltering in Place

Sheltering in place has its rewards,

and he prefers it, having lived

a long time alone,

a cabin in the woods

his undisputed territory,

built from discards and remainders

with those same hands when young,

his demesne where he evolves,

silent and attentive among trees

in the foreglow of the year

unique to March, an open, even light

in elevated overcast, undisturbed,

where memory begets memory

and a man can turn more deeply

into himself, an internal migration,

each day nearer the western horizon,

a sane way to live, keeping pace

with the seasons, the resident birds

quick to the feeder, he hears their claws

on the porch post, he hears the wind

in bare crowns, he almost hears

yesterday's rain

rising in the strong gray trunks

as fear of sickness

spreads across the human earth,

and the grating of a nuthatch annuls it.

At the Higher Elevations

The day is a poem.

Rain becomes snow

clinging to the weeds and trees,

an apotheosis of the woods and fields

in an unhistoric afternoon,

a growing good,

easing us into silence.


The cardinal returns to his perch in the laurel

without dislodging a single flake.

Inverted Earth

Trees reaching down

into the sea-sky,

islands of vapor

floating beneath me,

sea-wind shaking up seeds

into the magnetic ground

that holds me firm

against this warming stone,

dying to live,

expecting my long wait

won't be in vain

for your return,

the way of things

on this inverted earth

to which I belong

and will never leave.

Metaphysical Narrative

Once there was a woman who lived in a rock

and spent her days like a lotus burnt by frost

striving to be freed.


A great sage wandering in the wilderness

heard her singing a sad and gentle song

and followed her voice.


She taught him how to enter the rock,

the deep, open spaces inside, endless

worlds folded within worlds.


Every atom held a million universes.

He watched as they all came to an end

in a catastrophic fire.


Reality is internal to our minds.

—a found poem from a 10th C. Kashmiri Sanskrit text known as
"The Way to Freedom," and summarized by David Shulman
in The New York Review of Books.

Human

Lake Ontario, photo by Dave Sanford

   

   

For 75 years

I have ached for love.

Please tell me

I am all of us,

At once the most

And least we can expect

From the extravagant

Coincidence

Of mutual consciousness.

Forced to Confront an Unhappy Childhood by a Poem

Portrait, 1956

   

Try to think, the poem said,

of an image from your chidlhood.

Spoon, said a boy. Ah, the poem said.

But that is not an image. It is,

said the boy. See, it is turned over

on a kitchen table, and on the convex side

a small room is distorted, the middle

where the father sits with two young sons

taking longer to see. Ah, the poem said.

What of the mother in this distorted scene?

Eating on the floor, said the boy. Forbidden tableware.

Good work, the poem said. Strong image.

Very strong and full of foreboding.

Thank you, said the boy. I am still afraid.

—The poem is Louise Glück's  "Image," published
in the Spring 2020 issue of The Threepenny Review
and  adapted here to personal history.

Wind Symphony in a Pandemic

We're running out of time, old friend,

dreaming in the symphony of March,

unmasked and listening to wind,

remembering when people touched

human skin to human skin,

pining in our latex suits and hoods

for ghosts pursued, forgotten, sought again,

the wooded hills are full of them,

tuning their instruments of memory,

the strings of maples and surviving elms

pulling at our small and fearful souls,

the oboes of the hill oaks at soft distance,

an orchestra of trees and fields awakening

in the spotlight of the splendid silent sun,

tanning my right cheek and your left,

having enough, wanting nothing,

grateful for our quiet company,

old friends, expanding time.

Cinema

          

The movie is over,

the perfect life has ended,

Randolph Scott has ridden off

with his morals and his horse,

nothing but solos now,

nothing but lines composed in solitude,

and who will find them

after the last stanza is written,

and if that is you,

you will see yourself there.

    

—with assimilated lines by Michael Ondaatje