A segment of buried life

To such a naked redemption as this
She has come, slabbed in cold storage

Unrecognized all weekend

And her memory fading already or gone;

“I position her forsook bones in the sheet-lined box.

It holds with tooth and groove together

As if nails would be an adornment,

And it goes unpolished

Into the sodden autumnal ground.

The mosses fill the air and

Develop endlessly on the mountain rocks.”

There, with listless sanction a few words are spoken

Into the graven earth and for a while

The keen spoken trees are silent

And air is wrapped in a concurrent stillness

Until the first shovel coughs once

And the enterrement, if that’s the word, begins.

Everyone leaves. By this time they carry home

The regret of having committed a solitary mistake

By attending at all.

The door latch to each is supernaturally loud.

The speed of every voice I realize

Is untouchingly fast and

Words wasp in motion from one

Committed pleasure or thought to another

Or hive round the silent contour

Of a still unclear meaning;

The answers from mourners were vacant replies,

Or abstractions of some common guilt

Felt by all.

Yet, still the seedlings are on sale.

I pass a local nursery.

They will be planted from a need to plant

But may yet not grow, or grow yet

And struggle with the unplanted rhythm

That burden their roots

And brings barrenness into the stalk

And vine of successful fruit.

Only the following summers will

Reward the generosity of the fertile soil

They are entrusted to

And the air that warbles into the nested fragrance

Of wood, and sun, and wormed-earth,

And diurnal hopes that grey and cloud and

Rain and scorch and burn in humid

Pleasure and figure out the unspoken

Meanings of life in saturated mauls

Of warm soft beginnings.

In Amherst, Thanksgiving

Once on the
Marble table of a lie
We met
Or could have met

No one could have known
What wonder yet
Or ever yet you had
Meant

Dear Emily

Only that you did
And the tremendous lie
You forever hid
Could never die

Amen

Thanksgiving, America A.D

O Lord!

We thank you for this bounty

Which is like a prayer.

We couldn’t beg for more

Even without fear

Of retribution.

This is enough.

We humbly by your many mercies

In heavenly grace

Call unto your mysteries,

And the anonymity

Of your perpetual wonder.

Amen.

Glaze

An earthly love
Would be her kneading him
Whole, like a dark eclipse,
In a rice paddy under the moon.
A wild trimming of tongue,
Her hair strawlike
Strewn over his face,
Her urchin breasts in his hands.
She’d let herself be
Thrown as on a potter’s wheel
For his hands
Turning her soft as clay,
Damp to hold and malleable
To heat; the atmosphere heating to a point
Where things harden and
Shape, crystallizing into
A shining bright porcelain
Of glazed moonbeams.
And she might break and hurt him;
Cut him from the night;
Cut holes like dark moons in him
Until the red dawn flowed
Into the earth again.

For K.B.

Can a language be made for you
As if it’s an assuring summer breeze,
A language mimicking an essence that abjures
A peninsula’s approaching sea,
Its tonal faults, and pulps of vowel,
And imagined stresses that mean more
In the untoward remittances of a soul
That until a moment ago take you unawares
By its song, and colours and pithy ode.
The plinths of empire that line your jaw
And emaciate with age the idea
That you’ll be reborn without a flaw
In a new land, wholly yours.
The abject vines in the jungle
Where the elephants, en dehors,
Trample into trodden form the bangled
Fruits from trees and gourd earth.
Stand there while I look at you
And your black veil that mourns the severe
And pillaged intolerance in your eyes, that show
What a burden it is to be human
And know a fear that wants to run,
And hold a knowledge of persecuted facts
That remain with you still intact.

Paradise Lost, & Gained

I grew up with a disheveled version
Of hell. Thanks Milton!
How could I understand it all?
Let it all go.

There wasn’t translation available,
At least none I could read, so
I tore pages from its spine
And let them fly like angels.

Now a rot of heaven’s trumpet call
Is here, it’s fine.
The sanctity of the air I breathe
Is polluted at best.

This night, I hear only the voice in
Which it is written. Each line
Rising like a phoenix from
Its eastern shore,

Like bellows burning
All the lost languages,
And the innocence
Of my own experience.

Spring Currents

Finally, all that’s palpable
Emerges from a clothed bed
Disrobing into early light
To baptise itself under a flagrant heat,
A burnished shower-head;
The day ahead, humid procession
Like entrails digesting all facts,
A domain of senses fat with absorption.
Everything has to become rhetorical in
This light,
And the sound of every fact
Eloquent enough as a statement.
Even the proverbial duty
Of a language’s grammer
Must be softly seasoned itself
With the gravitational lull
Of calmed water that’s now
Settling over the fish and river eel,
And the pond plants that are given
Like devouts, wholly to their
World laden with solvent weight, and pontifical
Light bearing on through past sediment
Held lifeless in a buoyant-like belief.
Here, the dream swims. It is a salmon
Expecting life
In the Spring current.