I have built
Cathedrals of hope
And watched them shatter
In a breath of wind.
Even as they tumbled,
They were beautiful –
A million shards
Catching a sunset light.
And you asked me,
What was the purpose?
But all I could do was smile –
And watch the shower, and begin again
In the freshness of new morning,
With only a humble brick of glass,
A fragile mortar,
And a joyful heart.
Once again the heat broke with the rain,
And the sun came out as soon as it stopped,
With hours left to shine before nightfall,
And the world was clean, as clean as a new soul.
A sunbeam looked solid
In the corner of my eye
As if the turbid water
Had frozen it amber-wise,
Or time itself had stopped,
With only me still moving,
Slipping down the river
Like a summer ghost.
It’s attention that makes magic.
A very simple thing.
At a glance, a green blotch of woods
Lies limp on a dull horizon,
Yielding nothing of especial interest;
But closer up, it grows leaves and flowers,
And the shade takes a certain form,
Minutely shifting
With the tremble of the wind
In a baroque pattern
That never repeats.
Closer still, a darting hummingbird
Flashes into existence,
All blurred wings and gaudy colors,
On a fervent mission
To pollinate the world;
On his back is one white feather
For no particular reason,
And one edge of that feather
Is gently frayed,
But only because
You troubled to look.
The dignity of breakfast
Belongs to all men -
All equal in the morning,
Bleary and hungry,
Still chewing on a dream
That seemed like someone else’s,
And gazing blankly
At the horizon of a day
That stretches ahead
Like unfamiliar country
Where shadows change
And men speak other tongues.
What then? Bacon and eggs.
And buttered toast and coffee dark as pain.
For some people, inexplicably,
A grapefruit; for others, pancakes,
And the sweet nectar of Vermont.
We are all the same at breakfast –
Kings enough to eat what we desire –
And wise enough to linger
Over a final sip of coffee
Before the day’s vicissitudes
Divide us into havers, havers-not,
And dreamers-of-having,
Who are perhaps luckiest of all,
Surveying a kingdom of hope every morning
And living all day in that kingdom
Till night takes the reins again.
This is just a note
To remind you that somewhere,
Across indifferent miles,
A man is thinking of you –
Not with the glowing fondness
Of long and rooted friendship
But with the uncertain smile
Of one who has seen enough –
Enough to wish to see more,
And maybe just enough
To hope that you may be tempted
To see more of him too.
Every woman’s an altar,
But most altars leave me cold –
Too meager and ascetic, or else
Grown overrich on indulgences;
Too ancient, perhaps – too dark-ancestral;
Or newfangled, cultish, coltish, untried;
Too redolent of foreign mysteries –
Or blandly secular, as dry as fact.
Yet here you are, fresh as the new-born dawn,
And timeless as the timeless, anxious hope
That wells in me when I again behold
Those pureblue eyes, those winedark dusky brows –
And I am suddenly, fervently, religious –
Ready to kneel, to mumble, to adore –
To alter everything for a single glimpse
Of the sacred mystery at the center of you.
If we make it all the way
I will show you this poem
And we’ll laugh at the fool’s hope
That somehow came true.
For now I’m polite
And playing it cool
Burning in secret,
Making conversation
Nursing a hope
Little better than a dream
And falling in love
With a version of you
That I half invented,
Half glimpsed on a screen -
All dream, half woman,
As perfect as a lie.
The heat has fingers.
It takes you by the throat.
It shakes you like a dog
Worrying a rat,
And leaves you broken, gasping,
In the puddle of yourself.
But there are ways out.
Water is a great savior.
So, of course, is air conditioning,
In a restaurant or a movie theater,
Though inexplicably, some people’s houses
Are simply surrendered to the heat.
And then there’s night,
The refuge of the watchful,
When time slows, the air cools, and light
Is scattered into a million pinpricks,
Each one as bright
As a miniature sun.
The dead are good company.
They have the best stories.
They never have moods
Or awkward silences;
They are always a shining
Summation of themselves,
Instead of the cracked, unsteady,
Blowing-in-the-wind creatures
The living are. They take things easily.
They can’t hold your hand, of course,
Or drive you to the airport,
But they laugh readily,
More readily than we do,
Because they do not grieve;
They are past all grief.
They are always smiling -
We remember them smiling -
And they are never impatient;
They have nothing but time.
But at night,
In the lonely hours,
They have a way
Of vanishing again,
Leaving us alone
In the ocean of a bed,
Wracked with new grief,
As if on the very first day.
The only thing better
Than remembering you, my darling,
Would be to have you back.
Would be to have you back.
The old, good smell
Of three-hundred-year floorboards
Greets me like a mutt
The moment I walk in.
The house is quiet,
But a light is burning,
And a note on the chalkboard
Welcomes me home.
There are places and places.
Most of them just flow by.
A few linger like incense -
And some lodge deep in flesh,
Resisting entropy,
The normal wear of time,
And all other claimants
To the wandering, homesick heart.
Rain-washed, cloud-laden, the sky
Fades in delicate pinks and blues,
And God is beauty, too big for the heart,
Stabbing home fiercely, paling all else,
Cleansing the mind of even its joys,
Till the soul, transparent,
Is part of the blazing sky,
The darkening earth, the rising song
Of crickets in the meadow,
Who sing of the fall of night.
We had to dance,
Because there was music,
Because the sun was low
And the air was getting cool;
We had to dance,
Because we were celebrating
The union of two hearts,
And also life itself.
We had to dance,
In spite of your absence,
Or even because of it -
Because you would have danced, too.
We had to dance,
Because we still can,
Because time is precious,
And always slipping away.
We had to dance,
Because we are all that’s left of you,
And if we are not dancing,
Then who under heaven will?
One more evening –
God, give me one more evening,
With a sun somewhere
Below the horizon
And the final clouds
Dying in pastels,
And a moon waxing
(Or waning, either will do),
And – if it’s not too much –
A parade of fireflies,
Sewn at random
Across the meadow
Like Will o’ the Wisp.
Just one more evening –
And after that, just one more;
And after that, one further evening,
And one to follow,
And on and on.
God, please –
Give me just a million evenings,
And when those are passed
I will say goodnight –
But not with gratitude –
No, never with gratitude –
Because that is akin to resignation,
And I would not have a soul –
Not one worthy of the name –
If I did not always want
One more, one more, one more.
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 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.
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.
