The Old Campus

 

In the shadow of ancient buildings,

We lead our little lives –

Petty, provincial, groundlessly proud –

Warm, delicate, flitting creatures,

Flowing between the titans

Of Gothic, indifferent stone.

 

Yet who built the titans?

People as small as we.

Smaller, in fact, as well as fewer,

And with the clumsier tools at hand.

They were not angels, built out of holy fire,

But only flesh, craving and craven,

As prone to doubt and failure

As any of your drinking-pals.

History makes them loom colossal,

But they were the same ungainly things,

On a brief vacation from nothingness,

Made for the dust, making the noble world.

Easter

 

We could all use a little resurrection –

Especially now, with winter hanging on, 

Still biting the air in the early morning,

Chilling the wind, even threatening frost.

 

Gods, men, and daisies – all are prone to die,

And crave rebirth, and bloom in the new sun,

Stretching their infant bodies to the sky

Where summer blue has tremblingly begun.

Immortality

 

On the last day of your life,

You will wake as usual

From dreams that vanish

In the cooler light of day;

 

And, God willing, you will make coffee,

And sip it slowly as you like,

Because there is no particular hurry –

Especially now, with everything behind –

 

Everything but the cooling coffee,

The warming sun,

And the rest of your life.

Living Forever

 

When we have had every conversation,

Tasted every flavor of ice cream,

Been every place, and met everyone there,

Heard every song and read every book,

 

There may be a moment when we think, Enough.

Let others live now, in their own sweet time.

We two have had, have seen, have known our fill,

And nothing to us remains but silence.

 

We will take a moment

To honor that feeling,

And let the lassitude

Of a hundred centuries

 

Poison our limbs –

A long, long moment,

To let desire

Drain from us like sand.

 

Then something will stir

In the ancient heart of us,

Or some freshening breeze

Blow in fresh news,

 

And all the life we thought to leave behind us,

All the too much and too many and too many times,

Will turn to fire, liquid in the vein –

And we will need to do it all again.

 

Because the soul, such as it is, is young:

Eternally young, as young as blood,

And time itself has no need to grow old,

And life is time, and has no need to die.

Spiritual

 

Have you ever noticed that people who describe themselves as "very spiritual" are the absolute worst people you've ever met in your entire life?

Leap Day

 

Well, every day is Leap Day –

Utterly unique –

Stolen, unearned,

Unsought, mysterious –

A calendar anomaly

In which a few things occur.

 

Every day is a little life, really –

A chance to show the world

What you truly care about –

So every day,

In a way,

Is February 29th –

 

But today is especially,

And it’s as good a reason

To celebrate as any other

Reason I know.

The Bike Path

 

Every dead end in town

Bumps up against it,

In a clutter of sheds,

Old gravel, and dogs.

It must, I suppose,

Have been a railway embankment,

At least where it rises

Over the baseball field.

 

Farther on, bad land protects it –

A waste of scrub, a forbidding stretch of marsh –

And a single birch hovers

Over a lonely pond,

Where a bench is dedicated

To someone’s memory.

 

We call it the bike path,

But mostly we walk it,

Ambling between

Two sleepy twin towns,

And mumbling a greeting

When we pass each other –

A dim little signal

Between separate solitudes.