Reading The Threepenny Review

Back in the woods again

i like reading memoir

stepping into another life

more heartfelt than my own

because when it's too much

i can put down The Review

and be back in the woods again

under yet-bare crowns with the wind

the April wind and with memory

that cut like knives

the wind without blood

because the wind is pure and heartless.

—after Adam Zagajewski

The End of April in New York

Central Park Carousel, New York City

We sat in Central Park

without speaking,

waiting for her ashes

across from the carousel,

not yet open for the season,

the hand-carved horses,

enameled and gleaming,

powerful mid-gallop,

caught motionless.

What was there to say?

The city turned around us,

teenagers on skates,

pretty women smiling

for the sketch artist,

young toughs lighting up

under the stone bridge,

and beyond the peopled benches,

shouts from the ballfield

where men on their lunch hour

fought over a call.

Morning became afternoon.

The day warmed.

Couples held hands

at the hotdog stand

under new leaves.

We were together.

What was there to say?

We were all together.

Self-Portrait, Afield

         

And for those who understand:

Everything is not to be made new again.

I shall be inhabited in the old way.

It made no sense.

I should have listened more carefully

to the words under the wind

as it moved toward me.

The weather keeps me at my small tasks,

sorting out the news,

mending this and that

through the chain of lengthening days.

A hawk drifts by.

Hugely, spring exists again

under the smiling expanse of the sky,

and now it is time to wait again.

These pauses are supposed to be life.

Let's get on with it.

But what about the past?

The past slips through my fingers

in a dark dream of April,

the necklace of wishes alive and breathing

at your throat.

Why must it always end this way,

with a woman reading,

with the ruckus of her hair,

pulling me back into the silence

that night can't explain?

It drifts away in fragments,

and one is left sitting in the field

to try to write poetry,

some reason for having come so far,

so far alone, unasked.

The landscape sweeps out from me

to disappear on the horizon.

Yet the strewn evidence means something,

the small accidents and pleasures

of the day as it moves gracelessly on.

I am sitting in a place where sunlight

filters down, waiting for someone to come.

Will they notice me, this time as I am?

This is very near the end.

The sunset is starting to light up.

There are still other made-up countries

where we can hide forever,

wasted with eternal desire and sadness.

But I say it cannot come to any such end,

and yet it has ended, and the thing

I have fulfilled I have become.

The dog and I are here.

This is what matters for now.

Perhaps all that is wanted is time.

The breeze has dropped,

and silence has the last word.

A cento composed of lines from the poems of John Ashbery, arranged to be true.

                 

Body Heat

Rises into the thin April night,

leaving the empty house by its stack

as life leaves the body at death—

open a window, some cultures do,

to set free the spirit—makes sense to me,

standing in moonlight after building a fire,

last of the season, I'm thinking,

watching wood smoke rise toward heaven,

but what do I know, having seen it myself,

first with my daughter, then with my mother,

dead in my arms, holding them as they cooled,

and still I haven't a clue.

When We Stop

4 p.m., April 12th

Just the sky

is all it takes

to calm the mind.

Easy clouds

on polished blue,

our measured breath,

To ease our grief,

to let the past recede,

the day becomes a poem.

The future is the fiction.

Wet April Snow

 

Falls from dead pines

Down the back of my neck.

So much has changed,

Though the woods remain bare.

We will likely die waiting, old friend.

Let us walk awhile longer

Under the dripping trees.

Forest Envy

 

          

Early dusk after an April snow

had sanctified the woods

he walked the path

of a higher lifeform

or so he used to think

under the trees listening

to the subtle harmonies

of wind in the budding crowns

the oldest swaying and sighing

in a song of their one place

which they never leave by choice

strong and peaceful and in touch

with each other their roots intertwined

it felt like they knew he was there.

O, how little we know.