After Five Years
I seem to meet you again
after five years,
in the middle of September,
in a place where I can only hear
geese honk out of icy,
fragments of throats.
When you died
the morning was like
a thick, gray horse.
I went alone in a train
which wound from New York to Ohio,
where I was born,
through states I did not know,
then traveled slowly through a Louisiana
where you grew up
that was lush and wet and green.
Something lifted me over the space
which bridged the train and the world of the dead.
The dead were colored purple and green.
They floated like clouds
In the changing air.
There was only a single voice talking,
with a sound like a faucet dripping,
or thin rain.
I would like to wish
you back to life.
You were here
five years a go in summer.
We talked at a table outdoors.
but the distance between us
grew hard to encompass,
like the stone table between us.
You died
when I was away,
restless, at a lake
under an even-shining sun, rowing.
Air separates the clouds.
The geese unhinge the muscles of the sky.
The air is changed from their honking.
I replace you with myself,
breathing in this red, dazed day,
feeling the hours wear thin,
as they repeat themselves,
and drive hard into whatever
is in this world.
Wherever We Went That Year
Wherever we went
that year
the birds dropped their wings,
hung listless
and damp
on the brass railings
and did not sing.
But the leaves rattled.
they talked to each other
in dry voices
and did not stop,
and we had the sound
of hoarse, other
voices
in our ears
for days.
We did not speak ourselves,
only went, walked,
and watched.
In November
two strings went up
on the monument
in the center of that city
for Christmas lights.
We had planned to climb
that statue for years
and didn’t,
and did not now.
They began with the strings
in November.
In two days the lights were up,
like small sudden stars.
We did not speak.
I watched the different
dappled cobblestones,
and your hanging face,
in the city I would leave.
Everything coalesced,
your pale face,
the soft light in your eyes
To Margaret
When I heard that news
I walked for hours,
remembered how we settled five years ago
in that red row house,
hunched over meals,
slipped out in the sloppy rain,
after cigarettes, drinks, men.
I remember
your smile, that some days
believed in itself completely,
your dark hair and eyes like mine,
Mondays in the pizza parlor
called Never on Sunday,
Tuesdays in the dark local bar.
Up and down
the New Jersey Turnpike
I thought of you—
vet we were never close friends,
and in those days
I could never like
my own resemblance.
For years we were roommates,
yet only rarely looked up
at the moon, blinked
at the sun, only rarely
remembered what it is
that people do when they know
that they, too, can feel.
But the railings on these buildings
are iron and cold.
The rain rings
like tambourines in my ears.
In summer
the dust falls
speck by speck,
and I know
we were uprooted,
went everywhere hard,
vet never strong.
uncertain
like flowers that swung
in a wind too full of its own longings
to hold us—
living and striving
in this gray city called Baltimore,
the city where you died
on a winter day.
You could not feel
that we loved you,
as we did,
yet only as other travelers can,
never quite at ease
in these loud streets, never singing.
Under A Morning That Has No Blossoms
I fear sometimes
I may wake up alone,
under a morning that has no blossoms,
and walk again over the corpses of things—
gulls disappearing over a curved shore,
sudden, swift, sure.
a room with stiff chairs that was home
for a year, the people coming and going, gone.
The sea seems to toss up its fears to the sky
till morning.
I sift, age:
a morning of differences,
a memory of turning in time.
This is the Final Day of Years of Sweetness (Petrarch)
She came north every summer
Nested in the ilex,
Sat on the metal pole
That marks the oil burner tank
In our yard,
And wanted to do nothing but sing.
My mothers remembers waking to the
Plain bird’s song early in the spring mornings—
As if happiness could begin at sunrise,
Last till evening,
And days could be spent in praise.
When I discovered the catbird’s rumpled body,
A hand’s span of grey feathers left
Every other part of her disappeared,
She seemed to have no words for me.
I wonder still why she cannot
Return south this year with her mate
Bring up fledglings,
Sit in the sun and praise
As if praising were everything,
Dying and living nothing.
Jonah, trapped in the belly of the whale,
Surrounded by darkness and shining skin,
Spoke to god and he was released.
Yet she cannot be released from this death,
Or speak to us anymore.
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