A Friend Visits

I leaned my bike against the shed,

my ride finished,

after you left,

orioles were hanging their hopes in the lilac,

its blooming done,

after you left,

the frogs in the reeds sang their hallelujahs,

after you left,

I sat with the silence of the hill.

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The day he set out for the sun

He was already old

Yet he felt the blood

Glowing again in his veins

And he heard the drums

Beating again in the earth

How else could he give it all up

To rescue a life with his absence

Esoterica

Here I am

talking to you in a poem again

when our time for talking

has long since passed.

Living is mostly sky.

The Woods Closes Over Him

   

Maples open their hands to the sky,

Oaks in the gray, and the wind.


On the board porch of the cabin he built,

The old barn posts also dream of their youth,

When chestnuts bloomed in these hills.


The wind in high crowns

Sings him to sleep in the sway.

Lost in the Latin Quarter

Left Bank, before the flames

   

Overwhelmed

before the fires

that burned the spire and us,

sharing a baggette

and fluted wine

against the Seine

in sunset gilt

too much for me,

weak and flawed, my kind,

history and light,

literature and art,

love, conceit, and clarity,

collapsed in ash

not to be rebuilt.

Not in Some Distant Place

I can’t help

But think about the dead.

Everywhere

Their flowers burn bright.


Still one of the living,

I walk in the woods every day,

While there's time,

Seeking peace,

Not in some distant place,

In this place,

Seeking contentment,

Not in some future hour,

In this hour,

Telling myself

Let the dead be:

Once I laid down

In that dark flowering.

—first stanza by Marianne Boruch. 

Blur

Things of real value

blurred

in a sudden May snow,

vision and form,

the brush-stroked field,

the pointillist woods,

in deeper abstraction,

memory and time,

words

that once had less weight,

transitions gone vague,

who do you love,

and where is she now,

and what is a lifetime?

A Place to Stand

Look further

with all we know,

with all that has happened.

All of the continent

lies under us.

—channeling George Oppen's entreaty to minor poets

Pavers

   

You've been sitting on the porch steps

late afternoons in deep maple shade

hearing the blue jays squabble

over sopping slices of Wonder Bread

tossed onto the bricks with a slap,

your grandpa against you

still in his coveralls,

the pavers long-since buried

by asphalt crumbling and heaved

over the roots of gone trees.

A Thousand Miles of Mist

We awake in the same moment,

a thousand miles of mist between us.

Here comes your ghost again.


We could not have continued,

there was too much time ahead of us.

Truth is, we are tied to each other, while we exist.

But what will happen to us in 10 or 20 years?


That we can hear each other at all

is the extraordinary power of language.

The mist from a world of whirling particles

produces form.


We must discuss it again.

We must try to understand it.

The final look of things.

—A cento built into relevance from George Oppen's notes and papers
collected in Part 4 of the first "Pipe-Stem Daybook," bound

together by the author with pipe-stem cleaners, c. 1965.

Renewal in a Slow Spring

     

Then let us match the pace of this slow spring,

Slow enough to see the thousand births

Rising from the ground at every step,

Slow enough to let our thoughts expand,

Tall enough to shoulder through the clouds,

Small enough to shelter under Maypoles,

Light enough to ride the rain rings on the pond,

While in our minds' bright ripple and release

We discover in ourselves the greening Earth.

May in a Minor Key

      

First step

into this next day,

cold wind for May,

nothing expected

under the singing wire,

 sky a tarnished silver,

determined not to retreat.