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BODIES All my members felt His in full felicity. I wholly melted away in Him. Hadewijch of Brabant Even the solitary mystics— it was their bodies God came to. Love knows no abstractions. It licks and sucks, wounds and devours. Even the infant stiff with desire, tensing and mewling, roots in tumescent flesh, hungry as the mystics for bliss, that pure white milk. | |
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THINGS All things wait, humble and profound, in the stillness of matter, in the lushness of their being. Their patience old as starlight huddled and pooled, content in what they are: wood forever thirsty, spade and spoon and your grandfather’s quilt— their dents and scratches and tears. All contained in a long solitude, in the mute eloquence of themselves. Unknowable, no matter the dark boulder of our desire, no matter the blue-milk light of their yearning. | |
| CAR RADIO After we crossed the Tappan Zee the New York stations came in clear, jazz and blues and far-out and the oldies, the Cleveland songs that taught me lust, the folk songs that lured you from the suburbs, and we got that feeling people get, driving all night with only the headlights and the stars, that we were young again and crazy, and we started singing, me, belting them out, knowing only the words, you, your timing and nuance and sound so fine, so heartbreakingly fine, singing Woody Guthrie’s old song “This Land Is Your Land”-- that that’s when it happened. I saw you. I saw you deep, not the tired guy coming home from the factory, not your neurons and muscles but the place the song came from. I saw where you make your song. | |
| IMMIGRANT DAUGHTER’S SONG All gone-- the silver-green silk of time winding down centuries of custom and kinship, the pouring of the sea, the stars, bright pictures on the slate of night, the moon stamping forever the spire of the church on the sand, bird-song, wind-song, mother-song. Even time itself changed to a ticking, a dot on a line. Customs of grace and gentleness gone name-saying and knowing who begat whom and when and where and who could work and who could sing and who would pray and who would not and where the fish ran and the wild plums hid and how the old mothers fit babies’ hands to the five-flowered hollows of blue ladyfingers, and whose father fought whose with golden swords a thousand years ago at Ballyferriter on the strand below the church. All gone-- changed from a silken spool unwinding to rooms of relics and loss behind whose locked doors I dream not daring to wake. | |
| KEEPING TIME Here I am in the bowl of the world someone’s finger on the Pole Star spinning me, gravely, watching me watching them. My guy’s asleep in the loft, back from the city. He wants to still his mind. The sun’s arcing lower now, 7 a.m. in September. I’m washing blueberries for buckwheat pancakes. Under the stove, a cricket’s keeping time. I watch the stars at night and never get lonely. But after my guy came home, I found myself swallowing my saliva, like the Tao master says a woman does when she’s ready for her man to come into her. |
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HOW TALK CAN MOVE LIKE WATER We talk all day in bed, talk like music or water. June already, a blowsy kind of Cleveland day, air full of love. Death skulks around and we let it be, like your tawny cat rippling in and out of the tree-filled window. Not grand talk, rolling like an ocean swell, more like creek water, transparent, taking small sweet turns we might miss if not listening hard, which comes easy as the past glides away and no future drifts toward us while we talk all day in bed a month before you die. | |
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DEATH OF A FRIEND Toward the end we talked fast as though the brown shirts were rushing at the door, but I always went away thinking I was forgetting to tell you the most important thing. We were never big on talking anyway. Mostly we looked at waves and morning skies and wallpaper books at light and mist and paintings. And we walked. We walked in the sun and the rain, on beaches, in woods, over the twine fields. And we breathed with the water and the dunes and the trees marching along, looking and looking. And the only thing you ever did wrong was bring sand into the bedrooms. And the only thing I ever did wrong was that once someone gave me a Waldorf cake and I couldn’t remember what it looked like. You’d sigh and wonder about the cake while I’d sweep sand down the stairs. And I made my poems and you painted your waterlilies, and all this went on for years, which is why, at the end, I could never remember what was most important to say. So I’d put ice on your arm and you’d tell me I’m so blessed and we’d doze, and finally, in the mustard-green silence of a July afternoon they came and took you. | |
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CERTAIN THINGS The worst of it is I’ll never be able to tell you certain things. For example, about Dorothy painting her bedroom furniture peach and all those years we drove so near her house but never stopped. We were wild to get to the ocean. And Yeats had a brother whose watercolors have the same break-your-heart music as Yeats’ poetry, and Charles, knowing this, began the Irish book with a watercolor the brother did of Innisfree. It tells everything about Ireland down to its tenuousness. You know, that wavery feeling made of water and light. And in the Sunday paper, a photo of Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward as a Midwestern middle-aged couple, maybe in the late 20’s, right before the Depression. It was fall. She had an airborne quality to her, one hand up to the brim of her felt hat. He stood planted like a tree, thumbs hooked in his vest pockets, a gold watch chain glittering between. But what I wanted to tell you was about the way she held her hand in the crook of his arm, the way it lightly rested there, the way her hand became a part of him, his arm a part of her. This morning on the white sunporch the light was so brilliant when I awoke that for just a second I floated weightless, remembered your saying a few days before you died: We each have a shimmering that goes with us. | |
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DEATH AND THE OCEAN Walking at Head of the Meadow, l try to wrap my mind around the water like Thoreau did, and when I can’t-- I get that exact defeated feeling I got with your death: Death and the ocean give no quarter, yet they’re beautiful. Easy enough to see in those seal-back swells wheeling to marbled swirls, but your dying, too, had beauty, no matter the mess and the pain and the smell. Even though you were scared and had no use for death-- slinking somewhere between the daylilies and the picture of Jesus the church lady pinned to your wall-- you still never said why me or tried to bargain or got angry. You stood straight up to death the way a wave stands up, transparent and, really, loveliest then, before it falls. | |
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YOU COULD HAVE LIVED I would show you the poem I wrote this morning about the nun who beat poor John Daugherty. “No one to touch her,” you would say. And I’d be pleased to speak with you about such things once more, perhaps hear you decide: “Beauty can come out of anything.” While the tide lays bare the flats, we would sit talking for a long time. Maybe remember that day, when, line and color not enough, you put down your paints for poetry. “Like going through a wall,” you’d tell me again. The slanted sun on our feet would remind us of Li Ho: how a purple man driving a red dragon was sent to honor Li Ho, who, dying, thought his poems forgotten. How Li Ho wept. We’d be quiet a while, glad about the red dragon. We would say: “How still the bay tonight, how far our voices carry.” |