A Simple Thing

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I wake to wander
moonlit rooms.

The day haunts me
this night.

Outside, a great wing of cloud
spreads across the sky.

Image of flight…
but from what?

Shadows tangle
on the floor,

but my dear one’s face is clear,
she is curled in sleep.

I sit and think of all the times
I will have to love her.

In the Museum

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Among still lives of fruit, broken
bread, glass doves and gold goblets,
hung a painting of a decrepit man.
He grasped at his cloak
to pull it more tightly around himself
against the opaque background.
His red-lidded eyes gazed out,
his warped mouth gaped.
There was no caption to tell
who did it, what it’s about.

A woman entered the room
pushing a stroller full of wailing.
She sat at the bench
in the center of the room,
tucked the infant under her shirt
and breast-fed discreetly.
She spoke sweetly to it; she smiled
and closed her eyes.
I looked at the painting,
his look of listening.

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Intimations

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A dead-end street.
Ragged yellow afternoon light,
the rain just ended.
Power lines gleam the hidden length.
The windows of the frame houses
flash shards of sky.

A boy walks down the sidewalk.
Even from this distance
I can hear his steps.
Every so often
he kicks a stone,
looks at his face in a puddle.

A dead-end street
spanning before him.

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Veteran's Day

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What used to be called
Armistice Day, but there were, of course,
more wars. The photo on the top fold
of the morning paper:
Baghdad, another suicide bombing.
The armored American solider
there to investigate, trying
to piece together this day pulled to pieces
as blood seeps into his boots.
Glass shards scattered everywhere,
a man’s scalp in the ceiling fan,
blood splattered in the shape
a child would use to draw a sunrise.
The tiled wall pocked with human-shaped
blast shadows, like those burned
into the sidewalks of Hiroshima.
No peace here among the wreckage of the dead.
A chair, upright in the floating dust,
waits for its person.

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Tree, Dusk, Distance

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Through blossomed branches
I glimpse the edge of the world,
its long purple clouds.

*

Trees silhouetted
in still, silent summer dusk;
day's birds come to rest.

*

Now the leaves turn red,
shiver in a fading light
far hills extinguish.

*

The horizon's trees
rub their branches together
to start a fire.

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Milkweed

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The spiked bone
cracked open, threaded
to a dried stalk,
disheveled by the mower.

A layer of matted marrow,
then the flat round
orange seeds inside,
stacked dense as scales,
and the white,
web-thin wings.

Their light tassels
flick open, the breeze
eases them from my hand.
While plumes speckle
this rusting
October field.

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Che Fece...Il Gran Rifiuto

--after Cavafy

I arrange the bones of my regret
in the light of a black candle.

Smoke writhes in the air,
clouds this gallery of memory
in which I have hung
a leaf, a feather,
two tear-dimmed eyes.

When the candle flame finally burns out
its image haunts the darkness.


Dante, Inferno III.60: "him / who made...the great refusal"

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