Nine Poems
Small Change
Curious, copper's
affinity for the floor.
How one finds it curled behind doors or setees
or in parking lots, under cars.
She said: You are my ideal, and he replied
Your ideals have feet of clay.
She laughed and snatched a penny from his ear.
She attracts men who know the value of a penny
is no more and no less than the sum
of its presidential head between its monumental tail.
A penny saved. And she wonders
what science compels her to pause every time,
to pick up, to take in, the small change.
|
English Horn Solo
(after Eugenio Montale)
The predatory wind that plays tonight
-- a devil banging on a metal drum --
the long pipes of the aspen, and sweeps
the copper horizon
where light is streaming,
kite-tails in a roaring sky
(arrowing cirrus, lit realms
above us -- exalted Eldorado’s
doors ajar!), or
the sea that scale by scale
alters its color,
and thrusts a twisted horn of spume
across the broken underland;
the wind that is born and dies
as the world’s hour dims --
if only it could play you, too, tonight
faulty instrument,
heart.
|
Oracle
Well, it often speaks of you, and then its note
might be mocking, or resigned, or deliberately tragic,
depending upon the scent of brewer’s malt
distilled into a whisky-colored sky
or the midnight fog that fills the window,
blunting your absent reflection
or the adagio movement of Rodrigo’s Aranjuez
stained with our fledgling passion.
Certainly, no revelations are required,
scrawled across the sky or otherwise
to duplicate the slow descent of your last kiss,
prescient as a crow before its shadow
plows the earth, your mouth poised above me
like a dark song, headed south.
|
Route
Not to say the Alpha and Omega of origin
and terminus, though from London on
The Flying Scotsman or the Caledonian
I’d return, and after years of retracing that single
route, it didn’t matter that I was a New World soul
meant to be seduced by the quaintness of enclosure
or the dye-green mountains of Carlisle and
Wordsworth, the Lake District, Dorothy fixing
a spot of lunch, or the craggy Northern coastline,
raw-cut of the sublime. Instead, I came
to yearn for the rocking rhythm of the train,
that caesura of place, and not the Queen’s English
of cottages and grassy mounds, slowing now
and again, as we reached the urban
punctuation of towns, how I’d lose myself
in clouded light as I pressed against the broad
windows, translating each fallow, in-between
landscape into radiance, nod off to the galloping
clack of the wheels against the grooves
of the track, the off-key violin’s protracted
groan as each jointed car shifted into position, or
lean back into the cushioned seat, and watch for
miles the endless furrows of plowed fields,
the shadowy, wind-twisted oaks and wild
flowering meadows flicker past until it would
seem as if the world’s motion-picture were
unspooling from my very thoughts, as if
I, in my foreign solitude, inside the exile’s
bubble-dream of home, were for a moment
the one still point in the frame.
|
Green Oranges
From my
kitchen window,
I stare into the wound of its trunk –
half-rotted from the bottom up,
stripped to its core, as if no live bough
should rise from the burnt-out
frame, but does. And clusters of
blown, green oranges festoon
what shouldn’t – my gardener neighbor
swears – be verdant, but is.
I would like to say a word or two
on behalf of such heroism.
How neatly and without ceremony,
my orange tree has circumvented
death, has reinscribed itself.
And of this, also. How the fruit ignores
the improbability of its existence,
how channeling past decay
the new life blossoms, is brought forth.
|
Eros in
Edinburgh
Not at
all how Princes Street bisects
the town (the New Town, that cameo
of 18th century dignity, of human-sized
epiphanies sparked by moonlight falling
on chiseled granite, or the Old Town,
the Castle’s pure, backlit gothic
shaking its cloak over the dark, volcanic
rock), only that it is so lovely here in
autumn, every church-spire and rooftop
steeped in the Prussian translucence
early evening gathers shade by shade,
reminding us that our souls
are locked forever into the sky,
and somewhere between progress and myth,
between blind empiricism
and the ancient lure of fairy-dust,
lies a city where each night
the lit streak and faint
grind of a bus ascending the Mound
is Eros, arrow notched,
announcing your miraculous return.
|
Tree Frogs
And now, at
dusk, they are singing by the lake’s edge,
an ancient antiphon -- slow, whistling ululation,
it ripples under this skin of rain,
their mating cry rising and breaking again.
Endless chain of seeking, yearning my own heart
yearns for -- stirred by the same, blind force
that unlooses the night or the wind,
tonight it repeats for a measure the small, recollected
music, and deep in the swell of its chambers
hears the other half’s answering call.
|
Wild Poppies
When in despair I fail to keep
within my heart the sacred heart of things,
and find instead the weight of life
that’s come to nothing, arrived nowhere,
I remember wild poppies in the field,
small crosses of forget-me-not filling up
the veins of Rosslyn wood, the sudden
torches of rhododendron and the bracken
stretching its winged arms over us.
I remember then, how we kissed that first time
until it was morning, and there were
no words for the perfection of our delight,
the cipher of touch that held us there.
I remember how the world must wait
on time and light, and the scarlet flame that springs
like you and I, unimagined from this land.
|
Two Things Only
Two things only. How the soul casts its
rod into water blank as polished stone,
and feels the lead weight take it down.
How you yearn to be a vessel
empty of prophetic grief.
One thing more. Fear of what this life
brings, the sad, burnt offerings
never enough to avert a universe
of retribution, so you pause below
a growling canopy of rooks, and
wait for a glimpse of the irrefutable badger
as he trundles home across the track,
and bend your ear to the river’s choir, its
deckled notes tumbling into forever
and enough. And this last thing.
For the day-moon’s pale coin rising,
as if we might yet say per ardua
ad astra. For you, who’d rather
drown in the god-smell of this northern
soil, in holly and bracken, and the hawk’s
descent upon the hare, who’d
snip yourself from the patterned cloth
and walk off laughing, laughing –
you keeper of the winter-slanted dawn,
prophet of the sun at midnight.
|
up |
contents |
|
*
