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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This night will never return
In the whole lifespan of the world,
And any ancient emperor
Would kill to be here right now.
Gratitude is not required,
But it may come naturally
When you remember how unearned
This whole petty miracle is.
I saw Kris Kringle
On Central Park West
Waving to the crowd
And climbing into a sleigh.
The reindeer were plastic,
And the sleigh was fake,
But I knew in my heart
He was really Santa Claus.
We’re living close to the bone now,
And laughing with weeping eyes,
And the raw stuff of life, unsugarcoated,
Is feeding us and wearing us down.
We can’t keep it up forever, but for now,
We have become a kind of warrior priests,
Turning the holy into the immediate,
Washing the altar with sweat and tears.
He was looking for the clean gesture -
The shining act, the unbroken line
Between the dream and the dreamed-of thing,
Between intention and the reaping-in.
From a height he could all but see it:
The valley running from peak to peak,
The river joining the separate places
Like a stitch in the fabric of the world.
But at ground level the view was different.
The valley was rocky and far from straight;
As for the river, it was unforgiving,
As angry as beautiful, and very cold.
This was the test, he realized:
To travel the line he could not see;
To make a straight path out of broken pieces
Or see a path where none appeared.
And part of him wondered if it would be worth it
To travel the river, or walk the valley floor
If nature herself were not set against him
With all her venom and her brambly tricks.
They say the journey is the destination,
But really the journey is everything;
There is no end, but only an ending;
There is no path, but we walk it anyway.
There should have been earthquakes,
The rending of weeping skies,
A plague of darkness, wailing in the deep,
And all the pageant of offended nature
To mark the loss and rage against the time.
Instead there was only an absence –
An empty chair, one side of a bed,
The kind clichés of mumbled sympathy,
And silence enough to swallow you whole.
The sun rose, indifferent.
We went about our little lives.
There was everything – even laughter –
Even that day, the day we said goodbye.
And really, there was a certain solace in it.
The sky does not darken when a man dies.
Birds do not fall like stones from the heavens –
And he would never have wanted them to.
The world he loved goes on without him.
What else could be hoped for, of a world?
The mourning was left to us, the living;
The quake was felt in the beating heart.
Rain slid along a window. Children played.
An old dog barked at nothing down the road.
The trivial symphony of daily life
Washed over us. We breathed again.
