AGAIN
Is Memory,
as they pretend,
mother of the Muse?
— or Forgetting,
who says, My friend,
I know
you’ve told me before
about love, death,
solitude—and what
were those other things?—but
tell me again.
AGAIN
To have you back
for an hour, oh even
in a room of dream,
and to say
something to change us
back to what we never
quite were—
would it be Love,
like one match
lit against winter,
like a key
turned in the ocean?
There is no time to write them any more, those long, slow letters left on the desk for days while one paragraph hardened, then another, and consigned to a delivery that took weeks. And few have survived, since they were burned after reading or in the hours just before death. Now you find them mostly in movies about times before there were telephones. The young woman takes one to a window, breathing deeply, because she knows that to read it she will need the help of the whole sky.
SIREN
The ambulance --
behind, ahead? – sounds
not too close, actually.
But we pull over,
obsequious --
wouldn't want Death
annoyed with us.
SENTENCE
So that’s why prayers don’t work: God doesn’t speak English,
doesn’t speak anything. His books are translations
from something not language, since to begin a sentence
is to drive from glare into the dimness of a tunnel,
losing the view of the harbor, the skyline, the heavens
(the universe of all you’ve left unsaid),
and what can God know of ignorance,
who cannot feel a single, solitary thing
as we do: as, for a moment, all there is?
Not that he hasn’t tried. Once, they tell us,
he let a part of himself be lost
in the dark box of a body, nights like eons
buried alive, the air giving out, each hard breath forever,
so that finally he tore what they call his son
back through the little hole between life and death,
the Earth shuddering, his mother abruptly virgin,
but not before he had cried his one real sentence,
My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?
That terrible sentence we hold to, all of us,
in this little room, alone with our wondering
who in the darkness of ourselves we are talking to.
FIRE WARNINGS
So much on the verge
of flame.
In a hot
wind anything
is tinder: paper, sage
feverish with bees, your auburn
hair, my hand
that glows with a thought.
Sunset
or sleepless dawn,
nothing is sure
but what’s already burned –
water that’s ash, steel
that has flowed and cooled --
though in the core
of a star, they too
would fuse and rage,
and even volcanic
glass and char,
and the cold seas,
and even
what we once were
might burn again—
or in the heart.
THEORY OF EVERYTHING
I pace my little hall, no mystery,
sit by my window listening: birds, of course.
My books, I can hardly read them,
they make so much sense.
Someone skips school. He knows enough.
Someone is fired, there are reasons.
Someone breaks down. There is reason
after reason after reason.
Some patient is cured, and dies of the cure.
Forms are submitted: natural causes.
They rise through the purest offices
like scentless prayers We believe.
Someone’s frustration sweeps his desk --
papers fly out. In due course,
they touch the floor, and already
troops move. From the bleeding front
fevers spread, and opportunists like fevers,
as evolution says they must.
Houses are emptied, farms stripped
and Death, chainsmoking commandant,
lights one child off another. Pardon: old story.
What causes are not natural?
Who can object to partly cloudy?
Who disagrees with the news as usual?
You're right, the world has no need for imagination.
It makes sense, it makes so much sense.
MOMENTUM
At our temperate latitude,
the Earth is spinning at 800 miles per hour.
It's smooth, no roaring in the wind.
We move, we speak easily.
But every once in a while
two who were walking side by side
spin out, shattering in smoke,
like jets whose wingtips touch.
And now and then, seemingly randomly,
someone falls and does not get up,
and recedes with terrible velocity.
ESSAY ON CLOUDS
Maybe a whale, as Hamlet mused,
or a camel or weasel,
more likely a hill, still likelier
a school of hills, since (as with us)
true singletons are rare.
We compare them mostly
to silent things, sensing
that thunder is something else
that gets into them -- a stone, a god --
and as for what they want to say,
aeromancy, which presumed to interpret,
never caught on. After all,
clouds weren’t reliable predictors
even of rain, and if they had a message
for us, we guessed,
it would hardly be practical:
clouds are not about
about, showing instead
boundless detail without specificity.
Whales, sure (which might in turn be
blue clouds), but we don't say
How very like a screwdriver,
or my house, or my uncle, or certainly
how unlike my uncle. For though a blend
of winds we don’t at our level
necessarily feel lends them
amazing motion, that’s not the same as
intention, so failure
is not in question. We wouldn't say
That cloud is derivative, jejune,
disproportionate, strained, misplaced
or (since they affirm nothing)
That cloud is wrong,
though truly they often bear down
on exactly the wrong moment – that overcast,
is it one cloud or ten thousand
that makes everything feel so gray
forever? From inside, of course – think
of flying through one --
a cloud has no shape. As with us: only
when someone looks hard, or we catch
our reflections, do we solidify as
whale
weasel
fool
and plummet. Though large clouds weigh
more than a 747, not one
has ever crashed, so admirably
do they spread their weight, a gift
it is not too much to hope
we could possess, since according to Porchia
we are clouds: If I were stone
and not cloud, my thoughts,
which are wind, would abandon me. O
miracle not miraculous! Everything
we know well
lightens and escapes us, and isn’t that
when we escape? So just as
Old and Middle English clūd
meant rock or hill, but now
means cloud, really I mean
in exactly the same way that stone
got over being stone
and rose, we rise.
ESSAY ON CLOCKS
Old clocks are likely to be made of wood,
with black hands, visible only by day,
since at night they sleep, sure we are sleeping too.
Whereas new clocks are nocturnal, or more accurately,
they could, like us, be up at any hour,
red, squarish numerals shining day and night
whether we are watching them or not.
Old clocks have round and unassertive faces
reminding us in somewhat general terms
in a tone that says probably you already know this
that in a little while it will be noon.
They don't mind showing how they're coming to this conclusion,
the long hand dragging the stubby one after it.
Or is it the other way? Whereas new clocks
treat every moment as a red letter day:
11:42 in lights, suddenly displayed,
as if from their vast imaginative resources
they had just invented this particular number
that is Now, and yet in less than a minute
they will come up with something even better --
11:43, a New World Record! Later than Ever!
Old clocks, if they weren't so deferential, might mention,
that they have seen something rather like this before.
They think in circles, seeing what they know
one way in the morning, another in the afternoon.
New clocks sigh at such imprecision.
Half past, a quarter after? No, they are keeping track,
though secretly, of milli-, nano-, attoseconds!
Old clocks find this compulsive and a bit pedantic.
Why not relax? They can hear with equanimity
the clocks in the next rooms slightly disagreeing.
They know we are clocks ourselves,
you and I, who run at such different speeds,
faster or slower, or slower and faster,
that they are amazed we stay in sight of each other.
They know no clock that fits on a shelf or end table,
or sits in a chair, can describe all that is Now:
only the Universe as a whole has succeeded there.
Yet even the poor Universe is humbled
by what is so simple it is beyond our telling:
countless are the hours that have never ended,
infinite are the hours that never were.
MEETING AGAIN AFTER DECADES
Our phones on the tiny table
like decks of cards
are silenced, but they light, they shake.
We know that they’re thinking.
Billions of years
none of the cosmic issues have been settled.
Water’s still seeking its own level,
the planet needs a few more eons
to figure out what it all comes down to.
On the smaller scale, it’s hesitantly spring,
and the server says No problem, back in a few.
Where we want to be is exactly
where we are,
but there's no way to get there
from here.
TRASH PICKER
It's Monday and our trash is out at dawn
when a pickup, one of the really old ones
(from the Forties, maybe?) with the puffy fenders,
like a creature twisted together out of balloons,
wobbles down the block, a little windblown,
looking for stuff that's not as bad as we thought.
That can't be an easy life, though I get the satisfactions.
We’re all still hunter-gatherers, at heart,
and our angle is hmmm what could I use this for
changing a stick or stone or shadow into a tool,
which is not a bit different from making metaphors,
and the free in Free Stuff means, whatever else it means,
free to become something completely different.
Yet when he stops and swings his tailgate down
there’s a tiny wildness tightening my chest
as if he were taking irreversibly and forever
every thought I never finished thinking
and all I ever meant to say to every person
I ever gave up on too quickly
or felt too quickly had given up on me.
WHEN YELLOW LEAVES, OR NONE, OR FEW DO HANG…
If life is a year, then this is
November, just about the day
I'm thinking it'll never get cold
and it gets cold; if life is a day,
then now is the darkening, serious
but not quite deep enough to sleep in;
if life is an hour, then I'm near the end
of a story I might or might not
finish in an hour. But life is a minute,
and suddenly looking up
from the page, who can tell
whether it's the middle or end
or beginning of a minute?
Note: “Momentum” first appeared in Harvard Review. “When yellow leaves, or none, or few do hang....” is reprinted from For Now (Copper Canyon Press, 2020) and “Again,” “Essay on Clouds,” “Theory of Everything,” “Fire Warnings,” and “Sentence” are reprinted from During (Copper Canyon Press, 2016)
