Category: Poetry

That part of the year so perfect
arrives, the longest day, the nights
cooling from summer heat.
We don’t yet know the name of a child
about to be born. We’ve not forgotten
the last hours of another loved one’s life.
That old line about hope and history’s
rhyme comes to mind and it’s less the easy
slogan some would take it to be, as everything
is there in the music of language, each and every
utterance all the color and none that way
they say that light is comprised, composed.
We’ve come to mark the birth and death
of what we loved —and love, grieving, thankful.

Strange how that song became an anthem
of ache and of yearning, or anyway
about some such sentiment.

It irks me, to be honest, how it seems to borrow
its cloudy meaning —pretend a depth of feeling.
The guitar hook: without question a knockout —killer.

Yet, I think it’s about there one stops actually attending
to the lyrics. Though the voice is heart-felt, convincing
somehow, parse the words, do your damnedest to follow

the syntax, establish some semantic sense and you’ll see.
It’s like you’ve come upon the scene of a child’s game,
one played with disparate dangerous playthings.

A kid’s toy cap pistol, a fifth of bourbon, book of matches
a name written on its folded-back cover.
That one dried rose.

Hold a perfect blue stone, find
its form in the closing
of your grip upon it
so perfectly sized for your fist;
its bruise color a match
for the cloud coming in
that day of the summer storm
that never quite materialized.
Be reminded every word
should be chosen
as carefully as this stone
in hand
or the lyric
of some song unto god
sung whether believing or not.

The sea seeming over full, two miles walked
one toward our past, the other back again.

As I think of it now there’s hardly a sound
or my mind supplies a tangle
of nothing against the ocean noise.

I see houses where we used to stay
—sweet memory, then the sting
of sunlight, this burning salt

closing my eyes as it did then.
I’d pretend to be sleeping beside you
and not to notice when you left

for the water where you were always at home
and gone further than fear would ever allow me.

They shuffle in wearing ill-fitted shoes
polished to a mirror like sheen.
black laces pulled tight as they can be pulled
still leave their feet loose within;
folded inside, otherwise useless, documents
tucked as wadding in around the ankle:
maybe that memo no one wanted to read
or would ever admit to reading, even seeing,
a projection of death tolls and popularity
across the horizontal axis of time.
One sits, crosses his legs such that skin shows above
his thin black socks, wiry hair on his shin. That joke
about the indolent tailor and his hapless client
comes to mind —poor man, but doesn’t the suit fit nice?

We’d’ve come stumbling from our beds,
your boys, half naked and shivering
to brave that slick steep stair in stocking feet
knowing you waited below
by that folding metal ironing board
with its worn silver-cloth cover,
the padding torn, the surface scorched
in places, blackened, burned through.
For each of us it was the same:
that humid gasp and sigh
as the iron was turned upright
weight of it placed in precarious balance;
you’d hand us the scalded grey flannel trousers
we were to wear that day
and each knew that pleasure as his own:
the warm cloth on cool skin—
each received this sensual gift
no matter his history.
There was no sin particular
to any one or the other of us.

stars in daylight
it’s not  they’re gone

voices still softly speaking
amid the blind noise

just as stones move underfoot
slow flotsam at forever’s depth

time’s echoing increment

the one idea of your life almost realized
the mountain crests like a breaking wave

—shadow cast upon itself
does not find more darkness.

O— how I wish I was making more sense.
There’re stories we live not reading

them or ever knowing
they exist.

She asked me, ‘Who’s that singer —you know the one
—that singer who isn’t Lou Gehrig—not him—
who was that singer who —wasn’t— Lou Gehrig?’

All of them, I answered
as I don’t believe the ballplayer ever sang.

If instead it described rain
fallen on dark soil, one pale flower
where no one would believe a seed had ever fallen
—where granite clasts —broken through
—showed so slightly proud

and if this fiction weren’t actually
about forgetting or ignoring,  but rather
about finding —just the one tender fact

—that stone awash in a turbulent stream
—to take it up, only to weigh it in your hand.