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.

Turned on the Lathe of Poetics

Soul Alchemy photo

        

The invitation

of open space,

the sanity

of light,

the kindness

of brevity,

the courtesy

of commas,

the sway

of syllables,

the very look of it

wih a carpenter's eye,

and the reassurance

of a point at the end.

In a Room in Roosevelt

In April rain in the city she loved

Deadly quiet

when I awoke and knew,

on a cot in a room in Roosevelt.

I thought to open a window

to free her soul

but all I could do

was raise the blind.

Below us, magnolia petals

fell on courtyard stones.

Above us, only sky.

I did not call the nurses

right away,

father and daughter

together.