Trophy
I believed a secret
keyhole might be found
in each & every city
And somewhere
were the keys to the city —
kept in a cluttered kitchen drawer,
not quite forgotten
but somehow gone missing
Many times now
I’ve seen myself the way
my mother saw me
“No disguises
in dreams,” that’s what she
would say
I sit at my desk
and complicate all
that has happened since
my mother looked
at my face & told me
that one day I’d be glad
I’d inherited her skin —
until, after a while,
something out there
or something here
inside me says, no,
you should write —
and that’s
what I do
What a thought — it
sounds almost childish, so
simple, as if the sun
had given itself
a trophy when a blue jay
flew from a tree,
and the bird
was the trophy itself
Without disguise
the stag appeared
one evening, as if
it had earned the right
only because of how cold & green
the ocean is as it flows
through the late summer meadow
a moment or at most two
for the grasses parted
by a North Atlantic wind
* * * * *
Pond
You aren’t the first to feel these things —
or are you? would you like to have been?
you whose loneliness became you
if you thought yourself the first
would it change you? (I bet that
you would like to be changed) humbled
by being chosen reborn
would you even know you’d been
reborn (I think you would) after all
you’d woken helmetless last night
again & again before the sun returned
the sun as usual bristling a little then
don’t deny the gift of happiness don’t
think it’s meaningless even if it fades
it would still take a paintbrush made
entirely of the thickest of eyelashes
to get it on canvas that face of yours
as it emerged a minute ago warming up
without warning near the end of June
a kind of 19th century face
with high Gallic cheekbones & watchful eyes
under a straw hat wide-brimmed
its tan crown banded by black ribbon
your eyes shaded by the brim
you studied the effects then of the drink
taken in long sips from that hip flask
a tree carries as it walks through winter & spring
early spring slow sips imperceptible
wild traceries of green at the tips of
poplars & willows their elixirs
turn the water to fluorescent algae
near the shore now that the thousands of
polliwogs & minnows feed on it too
the lip of the pond overfull
after last night’s torrent someone’s cheap
wristwatch left on a canvas lawn chair
in a netted cup-holder the sweat-dark
strap evidence of the body missing
from this scene but loved for its pulse
the watch still ticking after all that
lightning rain & thunder so many hours
have to pass for all the faces it takes
so long to see hooded within a face
loneliness is such a dark cloak
it doesn’t reveal itself so easily
it wavers there below you
on the sandy bottom as you float
under rushing clouds almost
dead center of the pond your shadow
a cloak dark & cold as your shame
warm & dark as your freedom.
* * * * *
Oh
How long? How long
will it be that I
get to feel this, this golden orb
pinging in my heart?
— a sleepless 3 a.m.
as right & wrong as air
now that the bug-spray mingles there
with Bach. So much
vibrato in the viola now
that the overwhelmed note
has to hide in my head,
bumping lightly
against some thoughts, nudging
one: you know
how I’d like to lick the spot
on your neck where you so often
rub that scent I love? —
well, maybe you don’t —
but if I were dying
yours would be the last face
I would want at the end
to see. The archer
elegant & serene in posture & stretch pants
who brings gifts both
kind & painful when she reminds you
you have a heart.
In the dark
I had been trying for a while to get at it,
what it meant
when you wrote. Maybe
I could be the hero of the story
however it went. I am not
the hero of the story. I’m only a man who
a year ago woke from a dream
and heard a voice, a voice asking
the one thing he needed to be asked:
“what makes you think you
can’t be touched in your life?”
I don’t mean to say
that I think it was your voice
I heard, only it is
so much like the things you do say
that I want to believe
it must have been you.
* * * * *
Fare Thee Well
Moss the carpet
underfoot makes a quiet shrine
beneath the birches & pines,
spectral trees, shadowy
as a biotech with no need
for venture cash —
the day demands an adolescent earth
to climb down to
on a ladder of blue spruce branches,
a high school landscape: woken on a chartered
bus in backwoods Vermont
coming home from a ski trip to Quebec,
I heard the young Jesuit
chaperones playing ‘Age of Aquarius’
over the PA —
the sitar sound of a wild river
more beneficial at other moments
of my education.
What I wanted from women back then
wasn’t always fucking exactly
but some belonging made of looks —
everything gets reified
by memories reshaped with the body
in mind,
an old shirt you could make paper from.
Her chin dimple quivering
when she adjusted a bra strap,
the lanky, pick-up game
precision of her walking over frozen slush
in knee-high boots. I feel kind of
Tecumseh Valley myself,
like Townes Van Zandt as a note
that reads ‘fare thee well’
in a dead working girl’s hand.
Everything, each incident, turns into a life,
whether wished for or not —
eight sugars in her prized cup of coffee —
remember our happiness? so simple?
sundered by a pint bottle of rye —
“Take your girlfriend
to get help,” the priest said. “Me,” she said,
“I’m just waiting for you
to check-out.” Get with the work
a goat’s heart knows best
in order to escape the bardo —
that’s what someone else
would counsel later, neither enemy
nor ally.