Jump the valley
ridge to ridge
over covered bridges
where lovers leave their notes
and sometimes wed
ruining their secrets.
Jump the valley
ridge to ridge
over scarves of mist
September route of raptors
following an urge
no stronger than you own.
Some don't make it
some don't try
some become stone
guarding the halls
to the past and claim
we were never meant to fly.
Jump the valley.
The work itself
the fewest words
for a precious few
for shipwrecked eyes
it helps to have night in one's body
as the sea holds night in its depth
to make something true for the surface
to offer survivors rescue.
Yes, death will come—
he feels it closer of late—
but not today.
Today he opens a window
and leans out to listen to the crows
echoing thaw on the hill.
Today he hears a richer moan
of wind in budding crowns—
so much water lifting in the trees.
Today he feels, in such power,
the nearness of the sun.
 |
| At L.L. Bean, Freeport, Maine. Photo by Erin O'Brien Schlicher. |
we were swimming
up the arteries of fish
like as if it was like
like sheep like tire tracks
there was an eel too
it seemed a warning
backwards in Icelandic
If you enjoyed this poem, why not. . .
—an erasure of the poem "Auden in the Aquarium," the Paris Review, Spring 2000.
is the only kindred voice he'll hear
he speaks a few words
just for himself
alone on this strange earth
deep in the February woods
the trees creaking with cold,
the thin white vines of frost on the glass,
the patter of small wings at the porch feeder,
the talus of snow on the sill,
and the man himself
finding themselves together again
just in front of the door
which he opens slowly
to enter the plank-sided cabin,
desk, chair, and book
blazing in a glory of sun.
—patterned on a 1933 miniature by Jean Follain collected in "Transparence of the World," 2003, translated by W.S. Merwin.
 |
| December 24, 1968, by the crew of Apollo 8. |
All of us,
it's warming to think,
dream the same dream,
but can that be right
on a planet brimming with humans,
deceitful, venal, fearful, and armed,
unless that dream
is someone to love us,
or someone to love,
or the existence of heaven,
and maybe that's all the same thing?
Tracks in hardened slush,
We made it into town and back
before the freezing rain.
When finally the power flowed
the world was art, desolate,
and ordinarily beautiful.
Don't tell me what you feel
After so many empty years.
Let guesswork fit my need
As the pendulum swings out.
Too much, too bold.
I couldn't keep the continent
From tipping, and it all slid into the sea
With a hiss and a boil.
Memory tastes of salt,
The beach is strewn.
We were the storm, you'd said.
I still know distant thunder,
Far off flashes in the clouds,
Your amber eyes.
Don't say what could've been;
It's sweeter not to know.
 |
| Marlene Dietrich in "Dishonored," 1931. |
Powers to hunt
Arachnid chiaroscuro
The elegant beauty of fakery
Dietrich's insolent smile
Facing down men with guns.
—An erasure from The New Yorker's "Goings On About Town," Feb. 8, 2021.
yet he looked to it for answers
under a sky as pale as ash,
hoping to be star-seized as the day ended.
The faces came to him when he slept.
He knew them all, the long-dead from his youth,
those who seemed to care, the older generations,
silent, all around him, depths unfathomable.
He should have asked them when he could.
Now old himself, the mysteries to the child
remained the mysteries to the man.
He should have asked.
This, then, the haunt of a poet's life,
trying again and again until he nearly got it right,
reaching into his own unfathomable depth
for what almost existed, or once did,
Risking visitations, frights in the dark,
listening hard, waiting for answers,
making again and again until the last voice
sounded like the first voice in weather.
 |
| near Galway, Ireland. |
 |
Jump the valley
ridge to ridge
over scarves of mist
September route of raptors
following an urge
no stronger
 |
| Nor'easter on the Outer Banks |
Voice of winter's middle,
one steady cheer for days now
high in the crowns of the tree crowd,
so like the surf on the barrier islands
in a week-long nor'easter
that I've come to hear it as the earth-sound,
so like the roar of our blood,
our own individual sea,
some call the hum universal,
always at high tide and the moon always full
with the wind always blowing
and the gulls and the crows always calling
and the great crowns bowing and nodding,
closed systems in a closed system,
one unbroken gasp for as long as it lasts
in an infinite silence.
In a February fog between snows,
focusing down
to a concentrated field of view,
a drop of sky on a thorn,
the world overturned,
only another human
can affect the quality of the day.
 |
| Hoarfrost at sunrise |
In a windless, single-digit sunrise
we walked the field in snowshoes
in the shadow of the earth,
hurtling through space,
first tracks acoss an unbroken plain,
our words before us, our breath entwined,
far-flung.
And later, our captured sun
ticking in the stove, our jeans
hung up and steaming,
hot coffee in our hands,
with our music and our books,
with each other, we were happy,
we were ample, we were slung.
Ten winters hence, in my remove
and waiting for vaccine,
I've resisted sentiment,
content with solos and the company
of lines— that which seems enough
has been enough, almost ample— oh,
but how I miss the words that went unsung.
 |
| Lull at sunset |
In a fine, steady, ground-glass snow
I step outside
into a muffled, quieter world.
In this fog of snow,
a willed imagining—
I think I hear you breathe,
you're listening again,
gloved finger to your lips,
snowflakes on your lashes,
poem perfect,
to the cars and toxins rolling
through the Casselman Valley,
a blended tone of passage
I hear now, assuring depth,
in a snowfall so peaceful it hurts,
a passage so weighted that sometimes,
in the middle of a mid-winter night,
from five miles away,
we felt the ground shake,
the trainsong running close to the frozen surface,
half elegy, half serenade.
