Overnight

 

Tomorrow would come

With its burden of disappointment,

Its petty tragedies

And goads of grief,

 

But for tonight,

The horses, in the moonlight,

Were cropping peacefully,

And in the shade,

 

A lone man walked,

For the moment unburdened,

Forgetting to doubt and hate

As he knew he ought to

 

And letting the sinful night

Wash his angry little soul

In the blessing of darkness

And the gratefulness of sleep.

 

Ten Years

 

Ten years went by

Without much fanfare,

Full of the usual heartaches and joys -

Weddings and picnics,

And three grandchildren

That you’ll never get to meet.

 

The river ran,

Unstirred by your paddle,

And books lingered on shelves,

Unread.

A million incidents

Awaited your comment,

Which never came,

And the silence keened.

 

Right now, on Interstate 81,

The sun is carving out patches of light

Below the bellies of bluegray clouds

From which white wavering tendrils hang –

 

And all that’s missing is your secret smile,

As if the whole show were just for you -

A private celebration of a life

Spent savoring the particular essence of now.

 

I am one of the things you left behind,

But unlike the books, or the heedless river,

I carry that smile inside of me,

In the deepest of places, where you still live;

 

And as long as the sun lights up the clouds,

Your face is there, etched in the burning light.

Buckley Hall

 

Well, we may as well sing

As the night is beckoning

And the old, pure heart

Remembers everything;

 

And we may as well pray

To the bright-dying day

That the ones the night has lost

Will somehow find their way;

 

For the night is very long,

And we only have a song

In the corner of the heart

Where the light is clear and strong.

 

There is pain in everything

That the speeding days will bring,

But the battle is not lost,

So we may as well sing.

The Ordinary Magic

 

His particular magic 

Would not set the sky ablaze,

Or heal the sick, or part the sea,

Or do anything much with snakes;

 

It was not given him

To divine the source of water,

See God in the entrails of a pigeon,

Summon rain to a dry land;

 

In fact, his magic 

Was not his at all,

But the common property 

Of common men:

 

The word,

As pure and elemental 

As fire and sea,

As the breath of God,

 

And which, laid into a certain sequence,

Could fire the mind, which is the only sky.

The First of May

 

Funny how dull fruition is. 

Summer is a drone, a lullaby, 

While spring is glory, overwhelming reason, 

Stirring the blood, sparking the heart’s cold fire.

 

The becoming, I think, is everything;

Being is hardly worth the time

When birth, after all, is the only life,

And death is a dream

Out of which flowers wake,

Blinking in the newborn, mid-May sun

And smiling on the living-dying world.

The Only Thing

 

To live, and simply live,

And maybe at the most

Say something worth hearing

About what it was like to be

In a particular place and body

At a particular time,

Which maybe, if you say it well,

Means something to other people,

In their own times and bodies,

And with their own petty concerns,

Who catch a glimpse of something immortal

Gleaming just out of view,

And always disappearing over the horizon,

Leaving the soul in material night,

With only the memory of the warm sun –

But memory is the same as light,

Because after all, there is only the mind,

Watching a shadow on the wall of a cave,

And finding joy in the dancing shadow

For as long as light and memory last.

 

Eclipse

 

In the superstitious past,

This would have been an omen –

A harbinger of blight,

A warning of leaner times.

 

Today, it’s a party,

An excuse to travel,

To wear funny glasses

Or wave the colander around.

 

We’re hard up for wonders,

But we love an occasion –

And to that degree, at least,

We haven’t changed at all;

 

We’ll take any pretext

To don strange attire,

Concoct a new ritual,

And bask in the chosen day.