STORM IN MAINE
Rain on the roof,
the Atlantic a mile away.
Dark liquid coursing
through arteries—
rivers rushing
toward flood stage.
When the sky’s all water
and earth’s flowing
to catch up,
what’s the difference?
Wide awake after midnight
in a little house of wood
by the sea, my craft
in the storm,
what’s the difference?
Lying here
listening to
rain, writing
my poems
in the dark.
THE POOL
Mornings we’d rise early and put on
Yesterday’s clothes, then carry our rods and bait
Along the wide path to the river
Dappled with bracken and beech shade.
Old enough to lead the way, I was
Young enough to be a boy and
Father and son were at peace.
We’d set up atop the granite overhang
Above the giant pool, my dad
Sticking to the same safe perch,
And me, nimble, clambering over the rocks
Down closer to the fish.
They weren’t difficult to catch there—
Little, mottled creatures smoothed,
Made hungry by the river. Always
I’d outfish him. I didn’t know
He stayed put for mistrust of balance.
It would be another year or two
Before they told me of his illness.
When the trout stopped biting, as they did
Earlier and earlier each day that week,
He would just sit, in no hurry to get back,
And I’d lay face down on the rock
Staring through the water at the fish
Gently finning five feet down.
And when I think about it now it seems that
Everything was still: the trout in the pool,
The morning sun in the branches,
My father and I on the bank. And even though
The river splayed itself white above
And below, noisily on hard cut-granite
Boulders in its rush to leave the mountains,
The river itself in that brief span
Seemed gathered and content, as if
It might be done with flowing for good.
SUMMER TWILIGHT: DRIVING THROUGH VERMONT WITH L.
The highway sprayed the evening rain
back up onto the windshield while
late light broke through the clouds
in blossoming purples and golds.
It was a year since I’d last
traveled that road, alone.
A year before, I was 29 and tired.
A year before, my father was alive.
We were driving together, not talking—
the two of us instinctual in sensing
when to keep our silence
and when to talk hours into the night.
I was thinking of my dad, reading my grief
into the hugely bruised twilight.
Staring through the window at nothing
in particular blurring by, you were
lost in your own sorrows, the ones
that swirled around your head
that summer, gauzy and thin
like the smoke from the cigarette
we shared at that rest stop perched
on the almost comically verdant
Vermont hillside, still silent together
like the tired couple we weren’t:
a little bit in love,
a hundred miles to go.
THAT WINTER EVENING WITH E.
two forces rule the universe:
light & gravity
-Simone Weil
Months now since we’ve spoken
I think of that frozen evening
we watched the film together—
the one about the pianist in Warsaw, a Jew,
who survived somehow
1939, 1940, 1941, ’42, ’43, ’44, ‘45
alone in the broken city cast down
stone upon stone.
We walked out into the night afterwards,
a thousand tiny stars sifting down around us,
50 years and more removed from that horror
yet we knew better: like everyone else
we’d seen the towers fall; soon
Baghdad and Basra would be burning.
From the craters in our own lives too
we knew that gravity delivers bombs.
We walked along the quiet street
through one luminous pool after another
beneath the streetlamps.
You stuck out your tongue to catch a flake
then surprised the silence
with sudden, girlish laughter.
Had we been lovers,
I would’ve taken your hand.
As it was, we turned to words. Theology’s
a big one and I was learning to pronounce it then.
While I quoted names on “the problem of evil”
your words flared on their own authority.
Little girl held in the arms of her father
is what they amounted to,
little girl held….
It wouldn’t surprise you to hear
I still can’t say whether music and love
are strong in this universe
or weak. After all,
Jesus himself said
my kingdom is not of this world.
The pianist survived—by meager
kindness and dumb luck?
At a pardoned piano his Chopin
sang out enough to move
ma Nazi officer to mercy
yet couldn’t halt the heavy tanks
or save a soul beyond his own.
Both more and less than lovers
in our difficult counterpoint
we walked along the frigid street,
coats buttoned up to our necks,
while headlight swept through the darkness
like searchers amid rubble.
And though our breath was warm enough
to keep the crystals from our mouths
and our hearts were beating safely
inside our ribcages, though our words
were bridges instead of blockades
and I’d name that feeling
some variation on happiness
that winter evening, a city we once dwelt in,
was itself a glass melody
delicate as the needles and twigs
held stiffly on the frozen trees.
I handle it gently even now
as if the slightest rough touch
could still shatter it.
UNTITLED
blackbirds and crows—two days
till November
weathered wood gray
thick cloud gray
stonewall gray
and the bark:
beeches and oaks
SOME PRACTICAL ADVICE
Among the ten-thousand things of heaven and earth
which one are you?
What you found once in the crook of a tree,
in the touch of a body, in the crow’s black wing—
articulate answers to an unformed question,
though they were hard to name
and harder to hold.
Now that you know that you lack
don’t even bother with words—
they’ve done so much to dissuade you.
Prefer absence
and let the strivings stir
unspoken.
Forget the moon and the sea.
Contrary to what you’ve been told
nobody ever comes back from either.
And don’t look to the sky.
All the stars out there,
they’re too far away to matter.
Unless your dreams congeal in the atmosphere
and fall with the rain
they’re gone for good.
This leaves us the land and the air.
And I see you eager to begin,
already shirking phantoms and wind,
stooping and staring
intently at the ground.
What we’ve lost, what we’ve sought,
it must be around here somewhere.
Pick up one pebble, then another.
Begin counting.
OCTOBER 3
When light was new on the world this morning
I woke in my hometown and walked long-familiar streets
beneath a long year’s leaves
just touched by the painterly chill.
Everything that happened had happened.
Yet I could breathe freely. My gait was easy.
Nearly everything I passed I recognized.
I could almost believe what I’d read by lamplight in darkness:
every moment has a couch of gold for soft repose,
its keepers in eternity—this moment linked to all others
in the ancient murmur of my blood.
At my father’s grave
dew on an unmowed blade
refracted all the fiery colors
one after another as I sat there in the sun
swaying slightly with each breath.
RAIN OVER KRAKOW
Seven stories up, we looked back
toward the Old Town
as it began to fall over the rooftops and trees—
a great, transparent curtain descending,
silencing the city.
Rain fell over the river and Wawel Hill,
over flower vendor’s stalls
and filthy concrete.
Aqueous fingers reached
for each leaf’s back
and felt their way into every crevice
between cobblestones.
People sought cover.
The pigeons grew pensive.
Statues young and old took showers.
In a not so distant quarter
droplets settled like prayers
into the just-cut hair
of grass in the synagogue cemetery.
It lasted as long as it lasted—
the steady hush falling
from somewhere unreachably lofty.
Staring through it, we found
no need of words.
We laid our names on the table.
In that immense hall of rain
even the cathedral
became small.