A Child's Poem

My father has died.

I sleep through the night

with the sheet over my head.

I am not afraid,

I just learned to sleep that way.

In my nightmare

my father is still alive.

 —after Nassar Rabah's "The War Is Over" translated from the Arabic by Wiam El Tamami

Chasing the Rabbit

I'm here to stay

on this mountain slope,

white again when I awoke, but nothing lasts,

the furnace in the cellar chanting like a monk,

Pandora on the nightstand

playing Dolphin Dreams,

the sea a long way off.

I'm here to stay,

the hood of night

lifts over me,

the shadow of the earth

rises at my back,

the world goes dark,

goes blue on black.

I'm here to stay

in the blue on black,

what joyful lives I've lived

with those who've come and gone,

how many storms, how many rains,

the barn, the shed are falling in,

I'm here to stay with what remains.

The dog is finished with her run

and joins me in the wreckage of the field

to watch the clouds expand.

My run, too, is at an end, or just about.

We chased the rabbit and came back.

We're here to stay

in the blue on black.

Up?

I never tire

of looking at the sky

with doubtful

expectation.

Becoming Music

 

What tragic shapes

We have become

In the wreckage

of the rural dark

What harmonies of grief

Moments of Heaven

 

Black coffee in a tin cup

on a board porch in the March woods

with crows announcing the end of winter,

I'm thinking heaven can exist on the earth

a few moments at a time, rocking

in my great grandmother's mission rocker

included free with a new cook stove

she bought for the family farm,

my great grandfather off in the oil fields

drilling another dry hole, dreaming of wealth,

not yet defeated, maybe still thinking,

as Thoreau wrote in his journal in 1842,

Heaven is to come, because this can't be it.

But it can, it can be, it can be black coffee

in a tin cup on a board porch

for a few minutes in March.

No such luck. Tidioute, PA, c. 1860s

(from a family album)

I Have A Strained Relationship

I have a strained relationship

With sleep

Sometimes in dreams

I sense your touch

But always

When I wake

You're never here

March of the Insomniacs

 

Here comes the day again,

creeping out of the west woods,

creeping yellow across fallow fields,

devouring the shallow snow as it comes,

scaring off the night

that hides in the old farmhouse

as a chill in the cellar stones,

that hides in the mind of the sleepless

as a reckoning

with the failures of a life

marching mute

through the goldenrod bones.

Then

 

I wish I'd known your name

To call for help in the night

And heard your soft footsteps

Coming and going in the dark

What Remains

Central Park carousel, NYC

When the worst happens,

silence arrives.

We sat in the park

in our out-of-town coats,

her brother, her mother, and me,

without, without a word.

It was spring in New York,

cold, cold and bright,

the gears of the carousel

still wrapped for winter,

the painted wooden horses

motionless on their poles,

frozen in mid-gallop.

Silence, silence was the whole story.

—first lines by Jane Hirschfield

Keep On Keeping On

(Solo Practice University photo)

Prow

into the wind

little boat

no land in sight

—After Simic. Title from Dylan's Tangled Up in Blue