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.

Miracles

 

Your private miracle

Is simply being conscious,

And no one does it 

Quite the way you do.

 

Eight billion people 

Carry similar secrets,

But each is complete,

And separate as a gem.

 

Trust that you are,

And that you have, enough 

That whatever filters

Through your prism self

 

Is worth the hearing,

And worth the knowing,

To some other lonely,

Diamondlike soul.

 

Hopeful Thinking

 

I know that I can love,

And I know that I can be loved,

And it is only a matter of time 

Before those two comets

Collide.

Firefly Winter

 

Every night I am watching

For the fireflies to wake up

Across the hollow and river
Where they winter along a bluff.

 

Every day I am waiting

For the dripping in the eaves,

The lengthening of twilight,

The greening of the leaves.

 

But as I watch and wait here,

The radiator purrs;

The owl hoots a warning;

The bobcat slyly stirs.

 

The waiting makes them sweeter –

Both the winter and the spring.

The one fills up with longing;

The other, with everything.

 

The Holy Night

 

There is nothing holy

About any particular night

Unless you fill it

With song and silence,

Old stories told again,

Foods long remembered,

Perhaps a warming drink,

And a few good companions,

Family or otherwise,

Who have come through the bad times,

And the good times, to be here now.

 

There is nothing sacred

But what is made sacred

By the diligent effort

Of imperfect men,

And nothing is saved

From the fire of the ages

Except the endless moment

In which we briefly live.

Why

 

Because after every disappointment,

Every heartache,

The world remains.

 

The world is innocent,

Vast as anything,

Utterly merciless,

Unfathomably good.

 

In it we find everything

We want or need;

In us it finds only meaning,

Its only meaning,

Its very heart.

 

We love and are loved,

But above all we are driven,

Drawn to the wheel

Where all labors are spent.

 

Stars wheel above us,

Too many to dream;

We toil beneath them,

Knowing nothing

But why.

Strasbourg

 

As I walk in the sun

Over the slow-flowing Rhine,

My mind is on things not said, not done;

People I’ve let down, who let me down -

The great, growing weight of neglected things.

 

Strasbourg itself is in no hurry.

It has been dreaming here for centuries -

Cathedral-crowned, canal-streaked, solid;

A place for major gods and minor kings.

 

One man is not large enough to breathe deeply.

Only a city can do it - late at night,

When no one is around,

Inhaling the sweat, the sadness, of millions,

The living and the dead,

Exhaling its own pure thoughts.

The Fire

 

There is a flame inside you 

That never quite goes out -

Though sometimes it burns low,

Low and smoking,

Singeing the core of you 

With bladelike heat;

 

And blowing on it may not help,

Any more than hoping

It flares up of its own accord;

And you may feel that nothing will help,

And for a moment or two

You may be right.

 

Then something changes.

You take a walk, or a new song plays,

And suddenly the old fire wakes,

Fierce again, young,

Leaping like a waterfall,

And all the dull dross of existence 

Is fed to the furnace 

Of your blazing heart.

The Survivor

 

I kept on walking, he said,

Until I was no longer in the cold.

 

How did you find your way? they asked.

I kept on walking, he said.

 

How did you keep up hope? they asked.

I kept on walking, he said.

 

You must be very brave, they said.

And very strong.

You must be a kind of hero.

 

No, he said.

I am no kind of hero.

It is only

That I kept on walking.

The Trouble with Paradise

 

The trouble with growing up

In idyllic New England

Is tending to forget

What a paradise it is.

 

The old barns and the deep woods,

The seasons painted on oak trees,

The held breath of winter

And the brief burst of spring –

 

All this can be commonplace,

As boring as apples,

When you’re weaned on maple,

Fed by the leaping deer;

 

It may take a lifetime

To see it like a stranger,

For whom the spidering frost

Is a jewel as rare as gold.

 

Snow and Fire

 

The sting of snow

Slaps you back

Into the present,

Where a fire waits,

A chair in front of it,

And sodden clothes

Drip dry in the blaze

And flicker of the logs.

 

Outside, the white world

Waits for you also,

Pure and cold,

And your whirling thoughts

Are crouched in ambush,

Vigilant demons,

Under a drift,

On a laden bough;

 

But here the fire,

Spitting and twisting,

Jolts you awake

To the brimful now.

 

Dead Time

 

There is no fixed limit

To what you can achieve

In the next ten minutes

Here, on this platform,

Waiting for your train

In what you might easily

Call dead time.

Off

 

Get off the highway

Onto a broken road

That separates a wheatfield

From a bare expanse of grass

 

Where silos tower

In the silence of the morning

Under a winter sky

Above the frozen earth.

 

There is someone waiting there

Who does not know he’s waiting,

With a story to tell

To someone who might be you.

 

There is probably coffee -

There is almost certainly coffee -

In a cracked enamel pot

Like everyone used to have;

 

And there is always time there,

Always and always time,

To pour and ponder,

Speak and wait to speak.

 

The clocks have stopped;

Even the sun is changeless;

And the old earth waits,

In no hurry, for your heart.

Plunging Into Kansas

 

“But if we plunged into Kansas,”

I said,

“It would probably become interesting.

It’s only dull from the air.

It can’t be all cornfields.”

(It’s possible I was thinking of Iowa.)

 

She looked at me

As if I were speaking a strange language,

Or making a joke

She didn’t understand,

 

And I knew, in that moment ,

She would never try Kansas,

And I would never see her again.

2024

 

We awoke to new snow

And plunged into the water,

Simply because the fresh year

Was worthy of some sacrifice.

 

The sun came out

And the lake was shining.

There were birds drifting

Under the silver sky.

 

It’s not so bad once you’re in it -

The water, that is, and also the new year.

Even plunging in is not so difficult;

The hard part is deciding

To be the person who does.

Christmas Poem

 

It was the right kind of chaos.

Wrapping paper was destroyed

With violent prejudice, revealing gifts,

Which were, in turn, either valorized

Or swiftly, ingloriously dismissed.

 

Food was feasted upon,

Drinks drunk,

And there were tears and laughter,

In the usual proportion.

The children were all aspiring tyrants,

But a grim parliament of adults

Withstood them bravely,

And therefore the dog

Was not permitted chocolate,

And the oldest was just prevented

From giving the youngest

A fascinating haircut.

 

After dinner there were a few songs -

A few favorites lovingly butchered -

And Dylan Thomas read “Child’s Christmas”

From beyond a crackling grave.

The night had come on hours before.

The lights were drowsy.

The tree was a thousand years old.

 

In the last moment before sleep

The blur of the day resolved itself

Into a single image:

A bauble winking among the boughs,

Washed in song,

Reflecting a perfect world.

The Moonlit World

 

Night is luminous;

Only the moon 

Drenches the world

In mist-mingled light,

Where shadows walk 

In the bodies of men

And everything is gently,

Beautifully blue.

 

Night is gracious,

Demanding nothing,

Condemning no one

To passion or pain -

Only spreading 

A moon-rich canvas 

For the probing brush

Of the wandering soul.

Warrant

 

You have my permission

To be exactly where you are,

Doing exactly what you’re doing -

In the same company, even,

And without further explanation.

 

You are even allowed

To wish you were somewhere else -

In a better place, with better people,

In a different, better life –

 

Although if you want my opinion,

Who and where you are

Is more than enough to be grateful for,

 

Because the sun, the rain,

The snow, the bitter wind,

 

Are all the things of life, and life is good -

As good as you will let it be, or very close;

And no one, now, is more alive than you,

In all your boredom, your dissatisfaction,

Your haunting heartache, and your secret joy.

Experiment

 

Imagine you spin a wheel

And end up anywhere,

Anytime, any occasion,

In the span of your own life.

 

You might be an infant

Parsing a blurry world,

Or an old man, old woman,

Watching a hospital curtain fade.

 

More likely, you’re somewhere in the middle,

On some undistinguished day,

Fretting about something minor

Or perhaps not minor at all.

 

Flies buzz, and birds are busy;

People wander through the sunlight.

Indoors, the coffee is cooling

And the radiator is shuddering to life.

 

You have landed here -

Now, in this moment.

It could have been better,

But it could certainly be worse.

 

There is nothing you need to do;

Everything is already written.

You have only to savor the sunshine,

Or whatever it is,

For as long as it lasts.