What Is and Is Not Enough

 

We’ve all heard them say it:

“Seventy years is enough for me.”

As if on some strange morning, not too long from now,

Coffee will suddenly lose its flavor,

Bacon and eggs turn dull and bland,

Sunrise bore us, and the chirping of birds

Go all discordant, like an off-tune harp;

 

As if someday we’ll run out of books

(Though new ones are written every day)

And finish all the little projects

That we’ve been putting off for decades now;

 

As if love itself could somehow sour -

Not one love but all love, overnight;

As if the child we cradle in our arms

Is only waiting to become loathsome -

Which in a way is true, of course,

But also not true, and very much missing the point.

 

The point is this: you have this little moment.

You have no other, and you never will.

Only two lengths of time can ever be sufficient

To sate the boundless hunger of the soul:

 

Eternity, and the infinitesimal present.

Anything in between is not enough.

 

December 23, 2022

A Walk on Christmas Evening

 

Warm light makes the cold colder;

The breath steams, and the beating heart

Keeps the fire burning in the blood –

Keeps my little human flame alive.

 

Other fires burn in houses,

Flickering on the happy cheeks

Of wine-flushed, gift-besotted people

Raising again the grateful cup.

 

A shadow steals by lighted windows,

Turning to face them, turning away,

Back to the gathering, snow-stung dark,

And his own hearth, not too far ahead.

Vladimir’s Pebble

 

The secret that Nabokov said he knew

Is that a pebble gleaming like a jewel in surf

Is really the jewel, and never was the pebble,

No matter what your grasping fingers tell you.

 

A string of lights you wind around a pole

Is not a string of lights around a pole

But rather an enchantment, faerie-made,

That makes a mockery of the mundane world –

 

The worldly world, which naïvely dreams 

That nothing is as wonderful as it seems.

On the Shame of Having a Body

 

One is tempted to be humiliated

By the wearing-out of flesh:

The falling hair, the weathering skin, the sag,

And other, nameless, cruelties of time –

 

As if there were great shame in being mortal –

A temporal being in a changing world –

A bubble in the flow of entropy

That slides the universe from dawn to dust.

 

But why should this be so? The same brute fact

That gives us birth and youth brings age and death;

And surely here the only shame is God’s

If all of this was His divine idea.

 

The rest of us wear the marks of travel, true,

And look like we live hard because we do.

The Good Kind of Day

 

It was a big small day.

The things that happened almost didn’t.

The things that didn’t happen were, as usual,

Far more seductive than the things that did.

 

But it was a good day.

A few people noticed.

A few people spoke,

And some of them were moved.

The earth did not shake, or swallow up the damned,

But there was a thoughtful nodding of certain heads,

And someone, somewhere, shed a year or two 

Without the inconvenience of being sad.

Nativity

 

Christmas is for children.

For them tinsel is trailing gold,

And every gift is everything wondrous -

At least until you open it.

 

A sound in the night is reindeer coming;

A bell in the wind is a racing sleigh;

And Jesus is probably Santa Claus,

Or at least knows him very well.

 

Snow is like ice cream, like a cotton beard;

Holly and ivy look good to eat;

Music is music, wrapping you tight

Like Mother and cocoa and blankets at night.

 

Carols are drifting in midnight’s air;

The year-wished morning is on its way.

Christmas will always be for children,

And we’re all children today.

Talking About the Weather

 

People say it’s boring

To talk about the weather –

The way the crystals of the early snow

Are gilded by the welcome light of dawn

Before it melts them like a metaphor;

 

Or how the warming of the April ground

Unlocks a fragrance that the winter hid:

A smell of lush decay, in which the breath

Of all the forest is exhaled at last;

 

All this is boring.

Let’s not speak of it.

Let’s talk of politicians, rising stocks,

The fashionable new way to wear a scarf,

And every minor health complaint there is.

 

Meanwhile, somewhere, quite unseen by us,

A boring cloud making its boring way

Across dull heaven is transfixed with light –

With sharply-boring radiance, and on the ground

A deer looks up into the golden ray –

Not bored, not talking, but awash in grace.

Light Between Light

 

In the time they call the gloaming

Between dark and dawn or dusk,

When the birds are all a-homing

And the sky’s an empty husk,

 

There is not a single shadow

Anywhere under the sky

And the light aficionado –

Such a connoisseur as I –

 

Can only stand in wonder

At the warm and sourceless glow

That the world is living under

As the starlight creeps in slow.

 

Picturesque

 

The moon is a perfect thumbnail

On a black still vaguely blue,

As if some divine cartoonist

Had drawn the sky tonight.

 

The world is not always realistic,

The mundane not always mundane;

Sometimes truth is the wildest dream,

Perfection only a moon away.

Consolation

If beauty is any consolation

(And it is)

Then everything is bearable,

At least as long as the sun shines

Or the moon halos a sailing cloud,

Or a single lamp burns in a distant shack

In the shelter of a mountain

Which tomorrow will be beautiful too.

Palimpsest

The shadow has a white shadow

Because the sun is moving,

Leaving behind a tracing of frost

In the shape of where the shadow was.

Is that what you call a palimpsest?

That’s a word I should look up.

The point is, everything leaves traces on everything,

So nothing can ever be really gone,

And no one can ever be really gone.

The Visit

 

I am only a visitor here

For a very short time

For unknown reasons.

 

I don’t speak the language well,

I don’t know the customs,

And I can’t really make attachments

Because I must be pressing on.

 

But I have another day here –

At least, I think I do.

At most another fifty years

To wile away before I have to go.

 

And this is a place for visitors.

No one is here for very long.

Let’s take the air, see a bit of the land,

Have a meal in the shadow of a mountain,

 

And see if we can even love each other

On this brief vacation from nothingness.

Human Things

 

A poem is only a human thing,

However cosmic it may sometimes seem.

It’s placing words in a certain order

And hoping other people think it right.

 

Some of us paint on the walls of caves

Or scratch our names on a bathroom wall;

We marshal black notes along stately staves

For a drinking song or a mating call;

 

And some of us make things out of words

In a hopeful frenzy, like bower-birds.

Inheritance

 

The dog does not know why it barks,

Or what it would mean to know why.

Ancestral instinct, buried in the blood,

Breaks out at the first hint of danger,

However innocent, however mild,

However warm I try to make my voice,

And the dog strains at the leash,

A thwarted wolf,

Protecting the pack on a winter night 

A thousand thousand years ago.

 

But am I any different? Do I know

What old and serious blood moves me

To wake or sleep, or seek a certain food,

A certain woman, or a certain word

To finish off my barking little poem -

As atavistic, it may be, as his?

 

A Gentle Reminder

 

While you obsess over things not done,

A bird is waiting in the woods for you,

Rehearsing a song exactly to your taste

In the hope that someday you’ll wander by.

 

And while you worry about the future

And grind the gristful grudges of the past,

A patch of sunlight is opening wider

In a meadow you haven’t seen in years.

 

The world is profuse if your eyes are open;

The world is profuse if your eyes are not.

In the time it takes to tabulate your failures

You could have heard a joke, met a dog, fallen in love.

 

Don’t seize the day. That’s not what days are for.

Just let the day wash over you like rain,

And tumble into bed with skin still singing

The tune it learned from the falling cold.

Codebreaking

 

Silence is a language

Not easily deciphered:

A Rorschach provocation

That shows you to yourself.

 

You fill it with the things you fear,

The words that you least want to hear,

Then blame it for all the baggage

You painfully dragged here.

 

Silence is a scapegoat,

Loaded with noisy sin,

Taking the shape of your favorite nightmare –

Unless you let the silence in.

 

Then the quiet again grows quiet.

The shadow no longer screams.

The silence is only the old, good silence,

And fears are only dreams.

Jamieism

 

If I have a religion, it’s Jamie McEwan –

The man who happened to be my father.

It’s a religion of rivers and books,

Long, ambling talks over mugs of hot tea;

Drawling, chewing on your words, telling stories;

Laughter like rain, deep eddies of quiet, too.

 

Our holy book is written on the heart

In letters made of sturdy, sinewed love;

And all our rituals are solemn, playful,

Woven through the weft of daily life.

 

And for a temple? You can have your pick.

A river or a bookstore makes good sense,

But anywhere that stirs the stagnant blood

Or fires up the ponderous brain will do.

 

There’s no dogma, and no dietary rules,

Although a thoughtful moderation is advised;

There are no priests, or really any god

Unless, perhaps, the world itself is God –

 

A blind, unthinking, terrible-beautiful one

As full of change and pain as life itself.

Fingers (A Halloween Story)

 

The boys of Crypt Grammar School were not easily frightened. The place was famously haunted, as well as dank, dour, evil-smelling, and cold. The masters were a grim lot, forbidding and prone to capricious punishments – though not, it must be admitted, without a certain sly gallows humor. Taken on the whole, it was no place for crybabies. The few whiners and snivelers who did turn up in September were invariably gone before their first term was out.

So when Arthur Stinson came staggering out of the library one October morning, clutching his books to his chest and all but incoherent with fear, the other boys knew that no ordinary thing had spooked him.

“F-f-f-fingers!” he stammered. “Christ, I swear it! It was fingers! Go and see.”

The boys looked at each other. Though undeniably cryptic, his pronouncement had tickled their imaginations. Someone, assuredly, must go and investigate. It was that, or tell the masters – and to do that would be to show that they were afraid.

At length, all eyes settled on Jasper Hardaway. He was a rangy, redheaded boy, and fearless. He smirked and stretched, puffing up with his own importance. “Let’s have a look, then, shall we? Collins, Wilkinson – fall in behind me.”

Wordlessly, the boys obeyed. They followed Hardaway into the dingy library, where ancient candelabra bled hot wax onto shelves and floors. Like most of Crypt Grammar, the library was underground, with no light but the guttering candles, no fresh air for a thousand years. The ranks of high, teetering shelving marched back into vaulted shadows. As usual, the place was deserted. The air was thick and uncomfortably warm.

“The nook!” cried Stinson, who had recovered some of his self-control and followed the others. “It was in the nook I felt them. Oh God, I can still…” He shuddered, and trailed off.

Hardaway veered to the right, towards a shadowy alcove set into the wall at the end of a rank of shelves. No candle burned there; the nook showed as a black, toothless maw. Even Hardaway hesitated at the edge of that dark lacuna. Then he laughed self-consciously and shouldered his way in.

A single table, heavy and ageworn, stood at the alcove’s center. Hardaway bumped against it, jolted back, and laughed again.

The boys blinked, and their eyes adjusted to the dimness. The alcove was empty. A book lay open on the table. There was no sound but the dripping wax from outside.

 Hardaway turned a mocking face on Stinson. “There’s nothing here, you silly little craven. No doubt you spooked yourself, sitting here alone in the dark. What you could have wanted back here without a candle, one can only guess. Perhaps you had some private–”

It was then he felt the fingers – probing, grasping, tense with feverish life. They seized his ankles, tickled his knees. Hardaway shrieked and tried to pull away, but the fingers held him fast.

 There was laughter then, in the dark, from under the table. It was not the laughter of ghouls or goblins; it was boys’ laughter. Hardaway twisted his neck and peered down.

Two grinning faces gazed up at him: Aimsworth, and Dillon. Aimsworth released his ankles. Dillon gave his knee one final, playful poke.

They were all laughing now: Stinson, and the others behind him. Hardaway felt his face flush red in the semi-darkness. He was glad the others could not see.

“Who’s the craven now?” taunted Stinson. “You jumped a mile, Hardaway. You’re not so fearless as you like to make out.”

Hardaway said nothing. The laughter tore and flailed him, ripped him to shreds, froze and fired the blood in his veins. Without a word, he dashed for the exit. The laughter followed him all the long way out.

 

*          *          *

 

That night, it was found that Hardaway had vanished. His bed lay empty; none had seen him since the afternoon. Masters and boys alike searched high and low for him. They peered into every cranny, but the boy was simply gone.

Arthur Stinson slept fitfully. In his dreams, a thousand cold fingers twisted his flesh till he cried out in pain. When he woke he could still feel them, crawling like spiders on his clammy skin. He thought of waking Aimsworth, but he didn’t want to be thought a craven. Arthur Stinson was no craven. He could not be cowed by a simple dream.

The days passed, and Hardaway still was missing. Stinson’s nights were a torment of grasping, needling, palpating hands. It’s a trick, he thought. The others are playing a trick on me. He could not imagine how such a prank might be managed – but he resolved to stay awake that night and find out.

He drank tea with dinner – buckets of it – and declined to use the privy before it was time for bed. He lay awake, strung up to a pitch of expectation. The hours ticked by. The ache in his bladder kept him wide awake.

At last he felt it, very distinctly: a single cold finger, tracing a line along his back. A second finger joined it, then a third, and still he waited. When all five fingertips rested on his body, he threw back the sheet and turned to face his foe.

Hardaway was gazing at him with sad, vacant eyes. He didn’t seem the least bit startled. He sat on the edge of the bed, so pale he almost glowed.

Stinson’s fury and terror melted away, replaced by a cold weight in the pit of his stomach. He stared at the pale boy. For long seconds, he could find no words.

“They’re looking for you,” he said at last. The words were barely above a whisper, swallowed up instantly in the silence of the night.

“They’ll never find me,” said Hardaway. His voice was hollow, and very far away.

Tears came into Stinson’s eyes. “I’m sorry,” he said. “It was just a stupid joke.”

Hardaway smiled, and shook his head sadly. “It’s not your fault,” he said. “You couldn’t have known, could you? I was on the verge of it already. You boys only gave the final push.”

“On the verge of what?” But he knew the answer.

Hardaway’s eyes slid away. “The old well near the main gate. As good a place as any. All I had to do was jump, you see. Not very much to it. I didn’t have to drown; the fall did for me, right enough.”

“But if you don’t blame me…” Stinson swallowed. “Then why are you here?”

Hardaway shrugged.

“Lonely,” he said.

There was silence then, as a great clock ticked somewhere a long way off.

“Will you come back?” Stinson wondered. “Will you keep … you know … haunting me?”

Hardaway lowered his head. “No,” he said. “It wasn’t kind of me. I was angry, I suppose – but I’m not angry now.”

There was another dreadful silence, and Stinson thought Hardaway had already begun to grow transparent, as if the darkness beyond him were swallowing up his wan little light.

“You may,” said Stinson impulsively. “Come visit, that is. If you like. Not every night, mind you; I do need some sleep, you know. But, say … on week-ends? I’m sure some of the others would like to see you too.”

Hardaway grinned. “You’re a good egg, Stinson. You always were a good egg. I’ll think on it. One does get awfully lonely. It’s a dreary business, being dead, you know. I don’t recommend it at all.”

He was gone then, the darkness once again total. Stinson shivered, and lay back under the covers. He hadn’t had proper sleep in days; he was desperately tired. Even the pain in his bladder had vanished in a rush of drowsiness.

As he slipped into slumber, he felt a pressure of fingers. Gently, delicately, they took and squeezed his hand.

The Fact of the Matter

 

As the sun rises, the frost on the fields

Takes on the shapes of the shadows of the trees.

 

It’s probably a metaphor for something,

But I’m content not to know for what.

 

Not everything has a meaning,

At least not beyond itself:

A pattern of frost that clings to a shadow

On a late-October morning

In an ordinary life.

Sons of the River

 

The love of the wild river runs in the blood;

The blood may be thicker, but the water is clean;

Untamable, surging, it sings in our sleep

A sweet song of cataracts known but unseen.

 

The riverblood wakes with a mad sudden movement

Whenever a torrent or ripple appears;

It feels no restraint and it knows no improvement;

The siren’s-call plunges are all that it hears.

 

My brother has put himself down by the river

To greet every morning its blood-firing urge;

While I, much more timid, can only deliver

A pale-seeming poem, and dream of the surge.

The Plain Man

 

I find myself becoming earnest.

Plain as a brown-paper bag.

Straightforward as falling, simple as grass;

Transparent as a window or a clumsy lie.

 

The wry twist and the daring flourish fade;

They lose a little of their youthful charm.

The blunt, square, cudgeling style gains appeal:

Words in good order, or no words at all.

 

Maybe silence is the best of all poems.

Maybe candor is the cleverest ruse.

Maybe if you open the book of yourself

To a blank page

 

The world can write its masterpiece

On your old and innocent heart

Before the book is closed, the story ended,

And the final simplicity falls.

Sojourners

 

We just get a little time here

To look around, exchange a few words,

Make one or two memories, eat good food,

Find love, make life, and learn to let it go.

 

Let’s not be overbothered

By questions of ultimate meaning.

Let’s have a drink, inhale the noontime sun,

Laugh at bad jokes, give comfort where we can,

And close our eyes in the final drowsiness 

More weary than sad,

More in gratitude than hope.

Fairy Lights

 

Every light is a fairy light

Over water, at dusk, at dawn,

Seen from the road through a screen of trees,

Gleaming in glimpses behind a hill.

 

And every song is a fairy song,

As long as you sing it quietly,

Whisperingly, with no strong rhythm,

Into the ear of someone gone.

 

Your life itself is a fairy-dream,

Dashing and dancing beyond your reach,

Laughing out echoes in unseen places,

Leading you on till the fever breaks.

 

And what’s left then? Just memory and shadow.

A pause, a lull, a taking-in of breath.

One last gleam over the dark horizon;

The sweet warm shelter of the endless song.

The Best Thing About Old Men

 

Old men get sentimental.

It’s the best thing about old men.

Their eyes mist up at the slightest provocation

They grip your hand, they beam at you, abashed,

 

And in their silence is a weight of pain,

Of joy, of gratitude, of holding-on –

But nothing of fear. No whisper-trace of fear.

They’ve outlived all their terrors, and they say,

While saying nothing, “You can do this too.

You can live long enough to let all go,

Except the slow, fierce happiness you feel

At feeling anything. I’ll meet you there.”

 

Then they relax, and smiling turn away

To watch a bird scratch madly at the dust

With eyes that see, and do no more than see –

Their hands at rest, their hearts at peace at last.

Elizabeth

You’re born into history,
Swaddled in pomp and castle drapes,
Weaned like a favorite greyhound in the shade
Of regal, royal, softly-blooming trees –

And then bright youth, exquisite manners,
An empire’s future rolling out
Like endless carpet at your questing feet,
Only to shatter in the masque of war.

You marry, lose a father, gain a crown;
You break your heart a thousand different ways.
The world whirls on; you’re not allowed to change;
We need you static at the maelstrom’s core.

And then you’re old. It happens very fast.
Your husband’s gone; the dogs are older too.
What’s left but England? England, and memory.
You did your duty; all the rest is noise.

The last day at Balmoral, you look out
The ancient window at the new, fresh day.
A bird sings on a bough; the sun grows hot;
You close your eyes, and Philip takes your hand.