One Silent Song

Bass Fishing on TV

There is a drift of sludge in my left eye
but still it sees
the miraculous olive of the murky lake
the gleam in the captured fish's eye
the flaming fluorescence of the fisherman's running shoe
and the colorless, joyful splash of the release.

Moments

1.

If I could find a bar on campus
anywhere that wasn't a pissoir
I'd buy a drink.
I am too old to be forever in the company of strangers.
Better to be alone in someplace dark
than aging in a cheap fluorescent spotlight.

2.

A few of the faded shingled slates I see
outside somebody's window not my own
have taken on the color of the sky,
scattered across the high pitched roof
among the newer darker ones,
rectangular lacunae that could be
slanting into a world as grey as this one.

Remembering Stephen Colaio

I remember Stephen Colaio,
A man I never knew.

I remember his brother Mark
And Mark's wife's brother Tom.

I remember Stephen, Mark, and Tom.

They worked together and they died
Together, high in the north tower.
Together at Cantor Fitzgerald, a place
Where many people died.

Stephen Colaio was young
And strong on the day he died.
Some people loved him then and love him still.
His mother and Serena.
The brother who died with him.
Others.
None of them I know.

He was homecoming king but someone didn't care.
And someone who didn't care, and didn't care, and didn't care,
Ripped the roots out of  the world that day,
Ripped them out and burned them.

Two thousand

Nine hundred

And ninety six times.

That day.

You can read more about Stephen Colaio here and here
But you will never understand why he died.

The 2,996 Project

Invitation

My eyes are beautiful.
My eyes are full of light.
No vanity, just fact.
They say the things I want to say
but do not know the words for.
You have to see my eyes see yours, my love,
just once, and let them speak for me,
or you will never know me.

Sunday Morning

Why do I not speak boldly
from the valley of dry bones?
Why do I not? I am the sin of sloth.
I'm good enough, the way I am, 
to fertilize the lilies on the lawn,
not raise the dead.

Et Expecto

Laugh with me, Christians, till your sides are aching
At the overwhelming crassness of this gift,
Your body’s resurrection, lithe and smooth,
Or ugly as the day is long. No Platonism here,
No vain Nirvanas. Foolish you were born,
And foolish you will shamelessly
Arise one day and dance
To the brassy voluntary of the Lord.

A Mockery of Concrete

Watching the clouds and crows today I felt
a pebble slide contrariwise below;
it woke me up, and then, what ho, how odd,
the waterworks -- where did they come from?
Damn them where they live and where they work and where they hide,
waiting to roll the little stones away.

Second Hand Emotion

So then that's it.
High time we got it straight.
I've heard the cadence; here's the resolution:
Whatever you remember is a dream
And anything you hope for is another.
All that is real is now and now
has fallen (through your fingers) to the second hand.

Seen from the Window

The sky is like steam over watery tea
and the limbs of the trees are like leg bones.
Paired off in the white-oak are buttery doves
Who eye their redemption
In kernels of corn on the ground.

Instead

When happiness brushed by me on the stairs,
What did she leave behind? A half-caught breath
In preparation for what never came,
A laugh that should have echoed down the well
And wreathed the balusters with knotted amaranth.

Almost

Behind my eyes your face almost resolves.
You almost meet my eyes; you almost speak.
I almost sit beside you by the fire
And curl along your fading shape and dream.

Second Teeth

No more sweet cheeks and little baby smiles.
Your face is half again as long and thin
As when I kissed you last
And tucked you in.

no bad dogs

All dogs are good in the depths of their doggy souls.
When they tear a book, there is no vandal in them
And when they bite, there is no sin.

Just Out of Reach

There is another world beyond our reading
Which trembles on the margin of the page.
We seek it out in words, forever fleeting,
Although we barely feel its starlight fade.

Renovation

Whenever you are feeling Januarish,
Visit a home improvement store at night.
Go to the place your guardian angel tells you:
Seek out the narrow aisles of wasted light
Where the relentless yellow warmth around you
Frames a pomposity of chandeliers.
Tilt back your head and close your eyelids. There now!
Watch as the color soaks into your tears.
But hush and listen once more to your angel,
Who smiles a warning in a tongueless chant:
If clerks in smocks should ask if they can help you,
Smile back at them and and tell them, "No. You can't."

Keepsake

The chair my mother left behind is broken.
One of the arms is off, the fabric has worn thin,
But I can still rock in it, rock and remember.

Aurora Borealis, 1131

This year, just after the Lord's own feast,
On a winter night, at our first sleep,
Was the northern heaven all as it seemed
A burning fire; Dismayed, we dreamed
Of an end to our dreaming, our time.

The Lovers

Death's rough angel is a happy dog.
With a toss of her head, she brings her sparrow home,
Astonished in the earthquake of her jaws.

In the hollow of your neck beneath the ear
You smell of cherrywood and sweat.
Your pulse is like a bird under my hand,
Your breath like a flutter of winds.

A Memory Freshens

Whenever I am sad for no good cause --
When some exhausted neuron fails to fire --
I think of the way he held his coffee cup

(It balanced neatly on his angled knee)

And how he looked at me,
And quirked an eyebrow at my plain desire.

A Nightly Visitation

I look for you in silence: through the miles
that separate, my heart can hear you breathe.
Dark overhead and dark beneath,
these moments are like isles
of blessedness.

Companions

Apart from every other thought,
I've set aside a place
To mold the contours of your hands
And memorize your face.

You lift me up; you comfort me;
You vindicate my heart,
Which lives upon imagining
As long as we're apart.

###
Where is the bridge whose span of arrowed arc,
However broad, can reach from me to you?
What twisted steel can hold the shifting weight
Of sorrows -- parallel but never shared?
I try to speak. You turn aside to dream
Of other, better voices than my own.

Paralysis and the Persistence of Grace

for my mother

Under a brow as featureless as sand
her syrup-colored eyes peer, fugitive,
within a face pulled taut and purified
of all except the sweetness of her bones.

"I was a homely girl," she used to say,
Planar and gawky, flat-faced, awkward,
broad across the hips.
"My eyes were small, my hair was dull.
It  never held a curl."
"But I had pretty feet," she said, and laughed.

Today, with ankles stacked like spoons,
in perfect ballerina's arch,
her toes point downward, waxy, straining,
elegant. Tight-welded by the subtle fire
that works upon the edges of her books
and fades her spidered lines of poetry.

Ice Storm, Easter Sunday

The branches of our cherry tree
Are slim, eccentric mirrors of the sun.
Fiercely white needles spark from every side
And light invades the eye at its own speed.

Light
Drives through the comfortable folds of grey
Too fast to hurt,
Too deft to leave a channel in its wake.
And yet there is a hidden room in which
The thin integument that separates
The body and the mind from endless dark,
Once taut, now sinks in tattered, ashen rags.

Light's exit wound is vast,
And yet it leaves the bone it strikes
Unshattered
And the blood it stirs unspilt.

Summer Still Life

Five ripe peaches and ants in the salt.
Two bowls of cherries. Juice and a pile of pits.
An empty sugar bowl.
Silver earrings of the dangly kind,
from Target,
and a double-jointed bug.

Haiku

Too many blossoms.
Overburdened, the plum trails
her skirts in the mud.

What I Have Learned About Love

Love is not something you always feel.
It is something you always do.
You are commanded.
Whether by God or honor, it is all the same:
When you disobey, you lose them both.

On the Road in Oklahoma

There are feathered mimosas
and crippled scrub oak.
There are roadsigns that say,
"Do not drive into smoke."
There are grasslands as far
as a person can see.
But on the Will Rogers
there's no place to pee.

Sudden Snow

Crumblings of coffee cups, styrofoam spatter,
pelted off parkas and danced over denims.
Featureless tidbits fell glitterless, globular,
Light little ornaments, early this year.
Somewhat surprising as people on buses
With ash-grains on eyelashes groped for their gloves.

On a Paper Sky

Flat unfeatured cloud. Slurry of powdered chalk.
Tree's matte-finished black bones taper, branch.
Backlit, feathering to colorless.
Pencil grey.
Lines half erased.

Double [Ptero]Dactyl

Flippity-flappity
Phantasmagorical,
Furry and bug-eyed and
Batty as hell,
Whatever became of these
Unprehistorical
Pteromarsupials
No one can tell.