Poems

• Fifty Poems, 1970-2020

  i

  After Baudelaire’s Pipe

  I’m the pipe of an author.
  You can see in my skin,
  almost Abyssinian,
  that my master’s a heavy smoker.

  When his cup is full of sorrows,
  my puffs are like the cottages that welcome
  tired ploughmen home
  from their labors in the furrows.

  I’m capturing his mind
  in my blue, wispy netting.
  I’m the cradle of his forgetting

  as my fragrant rings unwind,
  one after another, from a burning black bowl,
  like his departing soul.

  ii

  Encounter

  That the ravisher of Bukhara fell sick
  with chills before the horde he led could sack
  St. Amric’s cloisters and butcher the monks attached
  seemed like a miracle. The monks who never touched
  a bow or battle ax rose late
  and chanted matins by a taper’s light,
  and as the day began,
  each left his cell to work as usual in the sun.
  Their identities were only roles,
  but the famous Khan, the one who razed the rules,
  grew colder. He had spent all the fire
  in his limbs, the source of so much fear
  burned out, and the horde rode on,
  leaderless, done.

  iii

  Pictures & Words 1969

  Vietnam has me in a spell.
  The blue coated policemen
  and arrogant long hairs
  are street rioting pell-mell.
  Dispatched from a Pentagon
  our grey bombers

  are strafing the evening news.
  Cameras under a wing
  shoot film of rockets in swarms.
  Hopping like little sparrows,
  the refugees are fleeing
  homes and farms.

  Anchormen earn a living
  facilitated by lies,
  their moony, photo album
  faces orating
  as they advise and televise
  from the screen in my room.

  The truth is fading away
  as I try to separate
  the chaff of wrong from right,
  hearing Imperial Hue
  and Cam Ranh Bay resonate
  more familiar than Detroit.

  Iv

  Watch

  The watch my father gave me
  for my twenty-first birthday
  never did run correctly.
  Tick-ticking away,
  it was too fast, expressing time
  in a pantomime

  of white face, its angled hands
  theatrical and abrupt.
  I didn’t trust it two seconds.
  Watches corrupt
  with their minutes and hours,
  as if time matters,

  and the abyss between
  then and now were measurable.
  Better to never wear one.
  They say time will tell,
  but time doesn’t tell you anything
  except it’s passing.

  v

  Young Arsonist

  Safe asleep the child bears
  an archaic oneness with
  his crime: his eyes are shut far
  away into their nightmares
  of collapse; his body, lithe,
  resourceful as fires are,

  cupped into itself is as
  precarious as flame. Ten
  or eleven at most, blood,
  murder, ash; his delight has
  made him simple, a madman
  who has death as perverse food

  and others’ pain as shelter.
  But then, sympathetic truth
  sees the sleeping body, a
  lumped form innocent under
  the covers, the boy’s pink mouth
  is open, this is the way.

  vi

  After reading Raymond Chandler

  After reading one two three four five
  Chandler novels,
  my favorite part is always on the back cover:
  the Ross MacDonald blurb,
  and the phrases like a slumming angel
  and the sun-blinded streets.

  vii

  This Is A Sonnet

  This is the place that you live,
  This house, this wife, these children.
  This is the job you’re sick of.
  These are bills you’re drowning in.

  No getting away, either.
  It wouldn’t matter what you do.
  It’s your face in the mirror,
  all of it belongs to you.

  So, so what? Who cares? Just do,
  do whatever you put your hand to,
  and with all your might.
  The Bible says so. Advice,
  believe it or not,
  that’s good and will suffice.

  viii

  Uncle

  Uncle Earl’s opinions
  haven’t changed in thirty years.
  They’re all crooked,
  that’s what my uncle thinks.
  He also thinks,
  Oh the hell they aren’t.
  He says this in a voice like sheet metal.
  He’s worked around machinery all his life,
  whadda you expect?

  ix

  Breeding

  Wally dog, Wally Walloon, you have dog’s breath,
  hairy ears, fat paws,
  and a tail that wags back and forth
  like wipers on a windshield.
  People want to know what kind of dog are you,
  they ask who your parents were.
  I tell them the truth. Your mother was a bitch,
  your father some son of a bitch.

  x

  China

  The cricket in a wooden basket
  singing outside the door to a room in Mr. Wu’s house
  on our tour of the hutongs in Beijing
  was my daughter’s favorite tourist attraction,
  outpolling the Forbidden City,
  the rowboats in Behei Park, the Summer Palace,
  even the Great Wall,
  where we went on a cloudless day
  with our CITS guide
  whose name was Ding Bing, but we could call him Steve.
  I didn’t tell her that it wasn’t a basket,
  it was a cage,
  and we can call it singing,
  but it wasn’t singing.

  xi

  Beowulf

  My son has to write about Beowulf for English.
  He hates it, this old story, with its dopey language.

  It makes no sense, it bores him.
  The text is a thicket of burrs, not a poem.

  I tell him, life is a difficult assignment
  that’s always due tomorrow.

  He laughs,
  and I’m dismissed.

  He just wanted a topic sentence,
  not a life sentence.

  xii

  Pencils

  The pencils were as yellow
  as a road sign, warning:
  cursive ahead.

  The point of a pencil,
  dark and slippery as a dog’s nose,
  can bite.

  The pencil a schoolchild picks up
  to fill in row after row of empty lozenges
  on a standardized test

  longed to release
  from its dry yellow cocoon
  a butterfly of doodles.

  xiii

  Dog Sees Fox

  When the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog,
  the dog, lying on the grass on its side,
  opened one glassy eye.
  The plume of its tail began to beat cheerfully.
  This was something different, something remarkable:
  the belly of a fox,
  half a dozen pink teats and a fringe of reddish fur,
  passing overhead like a dream.

  Who says there’s nothing new under the sun.
  And when the miracle of the moment was over,
  there was as much purpose and pleasure
  in the warmth of noon, the softness of the grass,
  and the eyelid closing again,
  as there might have been in any chase.

  xiv

  Teenager

  When he stays in his room all day,
  who can tell if he will one day extend this inactivity
  into shiftlessness, or, on the other hand,
  he is an incarnation of the Buddha.

  I try to say something meaningful
  as he waits for me to leave his room,
  where he will shift from the TV
  to a computer game.

  Or he might download an album,
  and, tired out by that,
  cup a stereo headset over his ears
  and shut his eyes.

  Again on the other hand,
  maybe he’s the Buddha after all,
  teaching me that even when we don’t know
  how to love, we do it anyway.

  I try to tell him something motivational,
  so he will sprint onto some field.
  But this isn’t halftime,
  It’s just the summer before twelfth grade.

  I do hope the truth is on the other hand.
  Though, if so, this other hand
  seems like the famous “one hand clapping”
  that no one can fully imagine.

  xv

  Jackson Browne

  The music I would be listening to today,
  if I had the music on, would be Jackson Browne,
  Maybe from Saturate Until Wet or Late for the Sky,
  or the tune that I’m forgetting the name of –
  the one with childish laughter, surprise,
  and a touch of sadness.
  Most of his songs are like this –
  tales of the melancholy end of things,
  the twilight of a coming loneliness
  made even darker by the shadow of receding joys,
  with D chords and A chords and E chords
  and the slides on the guitar.
  How well it all goes with the peanut butter
  I am spreading on a slice of soft bread,
  the sticky cream on the brown wheat,
  and then the even sticker gore of the jam.

  xvi

  New Age

  I dreamed of a country whose aristocracy
  included Prince Matchabelli.
  The citizens there had two noses
  and only one eye.
  Perfume, which accounted for ninety per cent of GDP,
  was more valued than beer.
  That was in a faraway place and a long time ago.
  It was a land fearful of succession,
  of what might happen when the prince
  ascended to the throne.
  There was revolution in the air.
  The young hated the given order,
  while the old, stinking of envy, refused to cede.
  What now? The moon has already risen.
  It’s the dawn of a new age,
  if it can be called dawn, when it isn’t the sun in the sky,
  but only the pale, bald duffer of a moon.

  xvii

  Coach

  I haven’t seen God in the blade of grass
  or in the grain of sand.
  He seems more likely to be found in the clouds,
  soft as cloth, that sit like a hat above the hairline of the sky,
  like the hat that God might wear
  above the blue forehead of the world,
  like the one a coach wears
  on the sideline, if God were a coach,
  stubble on his chin, a headset in his hand,
  cursing a bonehead play.
  If the team wins, it’s the brilliance of the game plan.
  And if it loses, then it will be said
  that God can be no better than His players.

  xviii

  Inherited

  I’ve had more than enough of my face,
  the bulb of my nose, that fuss

  inherited from Dad,
  the chipmunk cheeks Mom contributed,

  my two hooded Mongolian eyes,
  a legacy of centuries

  of violations, who knows,
  hooves on the steppes, and blood in the snows.

  This crooked smile of the past,
  tolerated at best,

  my shadow of a chin that must be shaved,
  a parade of teeth that must be loved,

  this shell, the shabby had-me-down
  the mirror tells me is my own.

  xix

  Funeral Dream

  I hosted my own funeral, it was sparsely attended.
  There were no pallbearers.
  No one knew what a pall was, or why they had to bear it.
  All my life I’ve been shy about invitations
  and in death I was no different.
  I invited only my mother, who was already dead herself.

  xx

  Mice Race

  Never mind the inglorious Milton in the country churchyard,
  much less the tree that falls in the forest,
  that one that nobody hears.
  The mice in my attic are racing over the floor joists.
  There are champions in their generations,
  and all the victories
  go unrecorded.

  xxi

  Sleeping Outside

  Could there be any higher thread count
  than the sheet of the night sky?

  Do you want to taste the sparks of the stars?
  Have some, they won’t burn your tongue.

  Close your eyes, go to your dreams,
  and stop struggling to write anything down.

  Someone has left the quarter moon on
  as a night light, in case you need it.

  xxii

  Lola

  What must Lola Ridge have known
  to tell the East River to vomit back into the darkness
  your spawn of light,
  as she looked at reflections of streetlamps
  and illuminated signs
  or the lights on the masts of boats.

  In her photo on Wikipedia,
  she resembles Minnie Driver
  from Good Will Hunting,
  though it says there she was an Irish-born
  New Zealand-American anarchist,
  and never an actress.

  Those of us with ordinary lives
  can be thankful our fathers did not die
  when we were three,
  and that our mothers never moved us
  from Ireland to New Zealand,
  though maybe that wasn’t all bad.

  Unlike Lola, we never married
  the drunk manager of a gold mine in Hokitika,
  then left him in 1907,
  taking our son to San Francisco,
  where we put him in an orphanage
  and changed our name.

  Poet and painter, naked model
  for other artists in Greenwich village,
  bitter factory worker,
  arrested protesting the execution
  of Sacco and Vanzetti,
  lecturer on “Women and the Creative Will”,

  in Margaret Sanger’s cohort,
  Guggenheim Fellow,
  two-time recipient of the Shelley Memorial Award
  from the Poetry Society of America,
  none of this is us, it was you.

  So we cannot know
  what might have been on your mind
  as you looked at the murk of the East River
  at the monotony of lights that were mad with creating,
  maybe your mother, maybe that son,
  but like you we can only imagine.

  xxiii

  Sixty-Five

  It is comforting but not persuasive
  to read in Proverbs
  that a grey head is a crown of glory,
  and it is hard to admire skin
  that is like crepe
  or the brown spots I am coming to know
  like the back of my hand.
  I have no polish for this tarnish.
  I forget the names in the news
  and have lost interest in what’s going on,
  but my body reminds me moment by moment
  where I am going.
  My aches are like water to the fish.
  Small of the back, an elbow, hips, knees.
  The real losses are the ones
  that I can’t forget.
  My memory is Medusa.
  It makes the moving world stand still.
  I am happy most days
  for no reason beyond the ordinary,
  and can as easily be unhappy
  for the same no reason.

  xxiv

  Pages of Li Bai or Du Fu

  So many of the poems are the same poem.
  The night sky is observed, or the autumn leaves.
  A woman sits at her loom,
  or looks toward the moving river from a watchtower.
  She’s waiting for her husband to return
  through a mountain pass.
  Or the husband is seeing the moon in night skies
  and its reflection in rivers.
  And then the cry of a wild goose,
  this or that gate, or a thatched hut.
  But, always, on the facing page,
  the handmade words as elegant as skeletons,
  five of them in every row,
  the rows in stacks of four or eight.

  xxv

  Symborska

  Reading her poetry,
  I want to learn Polish,
  not out of any unhappiness with the translation,
  but for the opposite reason,
  so nourishing are these lines reheated
  that I have to wonder
  what they would taste like fresh,
  if they would from the oven
  still have the aroma of the bloodlands,
  where the grandfathers of my grandfathers died,
  of Dubrowna or the Dnieper River,
  seasoned with the dust
  from the million square kilometers
  that were once the Kingdom of Poland.

  xxvi

  Our Senses

  My dog wanders through the world by his nose.
  the grass is never greener, and the rose

  isn’t red or white or any color.
  It’s the smells on the path that matter.

  Humans have a different sense of being.
  We play it by ear, believe it by seeing.

  As for noses, we keep them to the grindstone.
  We do work our fingers to the bone.

  Also, our last day is not unlike our first.
  From our tears of joy at the newest birth,

  to our lamentations for the dying,
  we bookend our book of life with crying.

  Of course we say, stop and smell the flowers.
  but that’s for a dog’s life, not for ours.

  xxvii

  Exodus

  Encamped, not on the move, left
  with the mystic cloud by day,
  by night, the pillar of fire.
  When will this cloud ever lift?
  I want to be on my way
  before I’ve lost the desire.

  I stayed put through the spring rains,
  put up with the snakes and flies.
  From my former emotions
  some passivity remains,
  but the more neural surprise
  is this fever in my bones.

  This illness is what it seems.
  There’s no desert plant to take
  that will stall the contagion.
  When you are attached to dreams
  even while you are awake,
  sleep is a cruel condition.

  xxviii

  Hourglass Sonnet

  To prepare for tomorrow.
  know what you’re afraid of now.
  Make a list this morning
  and go shopping for meaning.
  And if you lose your way?
  Just pretend.
  All last days in the end
  are the same day.

  How many days ahead?
  The mirror’s the best measure.
  The spots on the back of your hands,
  the skimpier hair on your head
  are as good as any calendar,
  hourglass and sands.

  xxix

  After Reading Isak Dineson

  To the lengthening list of adventures that will not occur in my lifetime,
  add the steep climb up Mt. Kilimanjaro.
  I am also unlikely to breathe in the dust
  from the carpets at the historic Norfolk Hotel in Nairobi.
  As for the coffee plantation and home of Baroness von Blixen,
  I’m still home this morning, with a cup of Folgers.

  When I do back out of my driveway and turn
  on the asphalted street,
  I will not be driving past the beehive-shaped thatched houses
  and terraced fields of the Kikuyu farmers
  on my way to remote Meru Park
  on the eastern side of the Nyambene Hills.

  There’s a green arrow at the intersection
  of Inwood and Mockingbird,
  but no 300 species of birds,
  no riverine forest or savannah woodlands.
  And if I made my private camp in an idyllic clearing
  on the median of Armstrong Parkway,
  I would be arrested by the Highland Park police
  and taken away in a clean squad car.
  There is no riverbank anyway,
  no camp staff to provide hot water, bake fresh bread daily,
  or serve meals from the camp kitchen.

  So I won’t take the scenic drive
  up the forested slopes of the Aberdare Mountain Range
  to a lodge overlooking a waterhole where game comes to drink.
  That, too, is out.
  No superb game viewing will be possible today.

  And tonight, on my return home from work,
  I will forgo the alpine landscapes,
  the dense forests, broken by giant heath and scrub.
  I won’t spot a colobus money or a bushbuck,
  or camp for the night
  on the banks of a hippo pond at Ol Maisor,
  which is the ranch of Jasper Evens,
  a third-generation cattle and camel rancher
  and a fascinating character.

  I will also skip in this lifetime my drive to Lake Baringo
  and the refreshing swim at the Lake Baringo Club.
  As for the drive to Lake Bogoria National Reserve,
  where there are tens of thousands of flamingos
  as well as several elusive kudu,
  I might as well not even try to recall it,
  or say anything of the views
  of the surrounding Rift Valley and,
  at one end of the valley, the Maasai Mara,
  that vast expanse of undulating grass and woodlands
  in the southwest corner of Kenya, on the border with Tanzania.
  No wildebeest viewing for me, no zebra buffalo, elephant,
  cheetah, lion, leopard, impala or gazelle.
  No hike with the local Maasai or,
  that same evening around the campfire,
  an iced drink in my hand, no cocking of my ear
  for the night sounds of grunting hippos.

  I’ll be skipping all of it,
  including the return to Nairobi,
  the final farewell dinner at the Carnivore restaurant,
  the flight back to London,
  then on to New York and finally home.

  That’s where I may actually join the journey,
  beginning at its very end,
  like a tenth grader assigned Out of Africa
  and flipping to the last chapter
  rather than plowing through the whole well-written text,
  skimming this once-in-a-lifetime experience
  that won’t occur for me even once.

  I can however savor being back,
  the familiarity of the sullen teenagers in my household,
  the two dogs, the expanse of St. Augustine grass,
  begonias in the summer, caladiums in the fall,
  and the pansies when the weather turns colder,
  as it will begin to do any day now.

  xxx

  Mario

  Savio was the name
  on the mailbox
  of the white frame house in Venice, CA.
  I knew the lore.

  Famous decades ago,
  its fame as faded as the phrase
  make love
  not war.

  The white house was weathering,
  ocean air will do that,
  like it hadn’t had a coat of paint
  since 1964.

  xxxi

  Swiss Vacation

  We went looking for things to buy,
  Cuban cigars, a gold lighter, linens for gifts.

  At a shop on the Bahnhofstrasse,
  we bought a Sud See pearl, from Tahiti.

  You said, a pearl’s a living thing.
  It’s far from home, I said.

  It snowed every day in Zurich, storybook flakes,
  as beautiful as any pearl.

  xxxii

  Death Sentence In Nine Syllables

  The doctor gave you your death sentence:
  Inoperable, incurable.
  That was you he was talking about,
  not just your tumors or your cancer.
  He had had a similar patient
  still living nine years later. Had had.
  That was at one end of the bell curve.
  More typical was three months, six months.
  Typical you, you wanted to know.

  xxxiii

  Ballgame

  Life’s a change up, fluttering to the plate.
  Swing, batter, swing batter batter!
  Or it’s a curve heading at you and then
  breaking suddenly to the outside, out of reach.
  Mostly it’s just fastballs, high hard ones,
  whizzing at you and by you.

  Keep your eye on the ball, or shut your eyes and swing.
  Either way, just try to get a piece of it.

  xxxiv

  Hawk

  A hawk vanishes without a cloud to hide behind.
  There’s nowhere for it to go, so it must have gone into nowhere.
  That must be the most crowded place in the universe.
  That must be where the dead are,
  along with misplaced keys, forgotten telephone numbers,
  and the cheap vases that come from the florist
  with gifts of flowers and sympathy cards.
  The years left behind are there, too,
  impossible to change,
  and the future, no easier to change, heads there as well.

  xxxv

  Accomplishment

  I can’t tell the sweetness of life
  apart from its brevity,
  or separate good fortune
  from the disaster waiting to happen.
  What have I done all day?
  I’ve come up with a mathematical proof
  that the interval between one and two
  can be divided
  into an infinite number of parts.
  It took me all day,
  but I did it.

  xxxvi

  North of San Francisco

  We were conducting an interrogation of the surf, which was also pounding the rocks with questions. Whatever the spray was asking, it was the same thing, incessantly,
  and there were no answers.

  We hiked a path off the shoreline highway to Fisk Mill Cove. Crags and precipices. The clouds were inflamed like a final illness. The struggle of a cedar’s twisted trunk and its forking branches ended in shadows and lace. And when the sun finally set, it was settled. The Pacific had washed another day of its stains.

  There’s this thought that we’ll understand everything after we die, as if the rules will be printed
  on the inside of the box.

  xxxvii

  On The Recent Death of a Pet

  There will be losses as there have been losses.

  Death is a message that has been sent
  and can’t be taken back.

  His shadow lights every room of this house,
  The black and grey fur that he shed

  until the last day of his life
  are clouds that have come down to rest

  on the carpet in the hallway
  that only yesterday was leading to him.

  xxxviii

  Love Poem from Neruda

  There’s no such thing
  as my love for you
  separated from your love for me.
  If yours disappears,
  mine goes away with it.
  If yours isn’t here,
  mine’s elsewhere as well.
  It’s as Neruda taught:
  My love feeds on your love.
  It’s held in your arms
  without leaving mine.

  xxxix

  To A Roach

  Li Po could have written about you,
  American cockroach.
  You belong more to the Tang Dynasty
  than on my bathroom sink,
  but there you are in your dull brown armor,
  langorous, then surprised by light,
  and then forced to run
  from me and from my flyswatter,
  survivor, intriguer,
  more desperate than any hanger-on
  in the court at Changgan.

  xl

  Grandparents

  Sally Hoffenburg, you left Galicia by yourself age 13,
  to join a sister in New York.
  You married someone you never loved.
  That was in 1911.
  Nanny, your life was of no interest to me,
  your life in nursing homes,
  bed bound by strokes and unhappiness,
  your suffering life.

  Isaac Reegler,
  I was told you were a tailor.
  In Romania your mother
  showed you both needle and thread.
  She would have been the mother left behind,
  the one unknown by even one
  of her five grandchildren in Los Angeles,
  after the thread you cut.

  xli

  Operation Iraqi Freedom

  Knock, knock, you motherfucker.
  We hear a snippit of cockpit conversation
  on the news
  then see from the nose
  of a missile, as the missile
  pounds down a factory door.
  There is film footage, though it may be on tape,
  and the factory may have been a schoolhouse.

  xlii

  My Autobiography

  It’s not a Russian novel, with two dozen characters
  and unpronounceable names,
  or an essay and its rambling, gassy passages.
  Not a catalog, either, like the ones
  selling gardeners’ gloves and pillows with stitched mottos,
  each item described in one or two sentences,
  giving sizes and prices,
  not including shipping and handling.
  It’s not a short story,
  or, shorter still, a poem
  trying too hard to capture a moment of insight,
  but without rhyme or structure.
  No, only the shortest of formats will work,
  one that forgets the past,
  for a life that fits on a matchbook,
  its cover no larger than a postage stamp,
  a name, an address, a phone number,
  a slogan if I come up with one,
  and, inside, with their dark grey stems
  and that coating of white on their heads,
  nothing but two or three stiff matches
  remaining to be burned.

  xliii

  A Taste of Japan

  Each night at dinner in a ryokan,
  another lesson
  in the ten thousand flavors of fish.

  This is a small island.
  Its food, however, is a dish
  concocted in heaven.

  After a meal of sea urchin,
  salmon roe, and sour pickles,
  I may write a poem,

  one in a manner long since,
  a tanka, if I can,
  with its prescribed syllables,

  of the sort the emperor might have written
  before his ascension,
  when he was still only crown prince.

  xliv

  In Shopshireville

  Your choices are not limitless there.
  You can be the grass that withers or the flower that fades.
  You can choose the pebble on the seashore that turns into sand
  or the sand falling down that narrow part of the hourglass.
  You can have the rosy cheek of the lad,
  but only the young athlete’s
  not the one with an inflammatory skin disease.
  You cannot however be the young athlete’s monument,
  the one more lasting than brass,
  written to a measure
  greater than the count of his lifetime.

  xlv

  Isaiah 34:11

  He shall measure it with a line of chaos
  And with weights of emptiness.

  Truth be told,
  who hasn’t looked up on a cloudless day,
  with the sun in the sky,
  and not felt the weights of emptiness?
  Lucky you, if you haven’t, but don’t press your luck.
  You might still trip over a line of chaos
  on your way back inside
  to the cheese sandwich on the kitchen counter,
  and the tomato, with its tough shiny skin,
  next to the sharpest knife.

  xlvi

  Bookshelves

  Most of my books are loners.
  The Letters of John Addington Symonds have no comment
  on The Inner Game of Tennis.
  Stacked on its side, Emotional Freedom is holding up
  under the weight of an Edith Wharton novel.
  My oldest books are still upright:
  A Treasury of the Familiar,
  an Inside USA by the once- popular John Gunter,
  even the straight spines of The History of Psychology
  with their family resemblances, volumes one through six.
  All the travel books are comfortable in their lightweight jackets.
  On the unmoving train of my shelves,
  they keep to themselves, passengers with their heads down,
  unaware of any Gardens by Design in The Forbidden City.
  And if there’s a Conspiracy of Fools in the Works of Shakespeare,
  or The Optimistic Child ever visited
  a bitter Philip Larkin in The House of Mirth,
  nobody’s talking about it.

  xlvii

  Pipe Smoking

  In my months in Berkeley, I read Baudelaire
  and translated the poem that began
  Je suis le pipe d’un auteur.
  That was on Ward Street, close to People’s Park.
  Now I’m closest to the end of my life,
  though I tell myself it’s only the end of the middle.
  Will my pipe smoking, that sophomoric affectation
  that turned into a habit, turn into cancer?
  Don’t know. I can say I don’t care,
  but I will care, for the sake of the extra months,
  even the extra day, when the time comes
  and I want that time to smile back at smiling death,
  both of us with stained teeth.

  xlviii

  Cat, Dog, Man

  One of us lies on the bed.
  One of us howls at the siren sounds from Northwest Highway.
  One of us is always tired and needs a haircut.
  Two of us eat the same thing every day
  and drink nothing but water,
  lowering our heads to an aluminum bowl.
  One of us eats yogurt.
  One of us is paper, one rock, and one scissors.
  One of us never complains.
  One jumps for joy.
  One of us has large, glassy eyes.
  One of us sits and stays
  while the other two are closed parentheses
  on the sentence of a Turkish rug.

  xlix

  Wonder

  This may be the millionth time I wonder what I’m doing with my life.
  Not wonder in the sense of awe,
  as I might be astonished by the wonders of the world,
  either the seven of the ancient world,
  or the other, less catalogued ones,
  but more like the guy who dozed off and,
  suddenly awake,
  finds himself still behind the wheel in a car that has already left the road,
  jarred, in the bumpy ditch,
  and startled by the stunning approach
  of what may be a brick wall.

  l

  Hey Mister

  After meeting Mr. Tambourine Man,
  I found him difficult to follow,
  even though I recognized jingle jangle
  as the perfect description for that morning.

  I had never known anyone before
  whose first name was a musical instrument,
  other than a few girls named Viola
  inside and outside the pages of literature.
  Truth be told, I’ve spent years
  trying to stop my bootheels from wandering.
  I prefer a place beneath the diamond sky
  where I remain in place.

  I’m for staying put beneath any sky,
  even the dirty one, with a few thin clouds,
  like today’s, when it’s drizzling,
  and my dog is nosing against the fences framing

  the rectangle of our backyard,
  smelling the grass yellowed by winter,
  and finding his spot.
  Hey, Mister, I sing out to him,

  (referring only to the dog)
  trying to get his attention,
  but he’s old, doesn’t hear very well,
  and ignores my song.

  li

  Moth

  Stiff and papery, the moth under my bookcase
  must have been there a long time.
  It probably forgot how it ever got inside as it starved.
  At least no ants carried off bits of its wings.
  It remains perfect, spread open
  like two pages out of the one of the books above it,
  one of the mysteries,
  and looking as if nothing
  could keep it from flying, other than death.

  lii

  Shambhala

  She said focus on your breath
  though it was harder to ignore the ache
  in my lower back,
  or the tilt of the pillow I sat on,
  the pillow on a mat,
  the mat on a polished hardwood floor,
  or the unbuttoned last button and wedge of belly
  beneath a red shirt she wore on the dais,
  which might be called a podium,
  at my introduction to meditation at the Shambhala Center,
  though my eyes were tilted down
  per the instruction, in a soft focus,
  disengaged, I supposed,
  as if supposing were not part of the problem,
  and as noisy as my breathing.

  liii

  Poem A Day

  For years I have subscribed to Poem A Day,
  receiving a poem a day, via email, seven days a week.
  And what have I learned?

  There are hundreds of poets
  writing thousands of poems a day
  and also at night, under a goosenecked lamp,

  after their children are put to bed,
  and their wives or husbands have finished watching
  the TV, and gone to sleep.

  That’s assuming that these tolerant spouses
  haven’t finished with the poets
  and left them ten thousand poems ago

  to sit alone writing their poems,
  which are also full of arbitrary breaks.

  liv

  To The Reader

  I don’t care, reader,
  whether you like or dislike
  what I write here.
  It wasn’t created for you, I never gave it to you.
  I would be fine knowing that you like it,
  but I would not have been deterred
  by your dislike, had I known.
  It would be as though you disliked my prayer,
  and you are not my god.

• Half-Eaten Poems & Other Leftovers

  i

  Fourteen

  Get off me, he said,
  something he has heard others say on TV.
  I was trying to take the remote control away
  from my teenager.
  He said, You want a piece of me?
  He sounded like some wrestler on TV,
  But without the skintight costume
  the belt buckle, or the muscles.
  His mother always said,
  never hold him too tightly, because he can’t bear it,
  and because it terrifies him, really,
  to be remotely controlled.

  ii

  Timelines

  Time flies.
  Time is out or up.

  You can tell time,
  but time cannot tell you much.

  Other than the hour is always late.

  iii

  Kelman

  Reading Busted Scotch,
  James Kelman’s short stories.
  In my opinion,
  they are not short enough.

  Who cares about these drunks and layabouts,
  these guys who care about nothing
  but the pleasures of the day?
  Not me. Not yet, anyway.

  iv

  Side Trip to Poschiavo

  Poschiavo was empty on a Sunday in January.
  Where’s everybody?
  We took photographs of the empty streets,
  ironwork, colored shutters, moldings on doors,
  a stony church, a single spire.
  Then we forgot the camera on the train.
  Where’s somebody who found it?
  Did anybody see our pictures?
  Nobody can say.

  v

  Coming Down

  With a scream in its metal throat,
  the plane is coming down no matter what.
  There can be no other end to any flight.
  Only the speed makes them different,
  a crash or the descent.

  vi

  Cat on The Table

  What was she thinking, jumping on the table
  in the middle of these travel brochures?

  She’s declawed, an inside cat
  who hasn’t even visited the neighbor’s yard.

  I’m making plans to tour China,
  Xian, to see the terra cotta army of the emperor Qin.

  Maybe she’s wondering, did they eat cats there,
  or did they worship them.

  vii

  Monarchs in Mexico

  I dream about traveling
  to see the ten million butterflies
  opening and shutting
  their orange and black wings.

  It’s not too far,
  not compared to the distance
  first west and then south
  that these monarchs have traveled

  to the sanctuaries of Rosario and Chincua
  where they cover the pine trees,
  so many of them,
  you can hear their wings beating.

  That’s a sound I want to hear.
  And not for the sake of the Aztecs
  who believed that the souls of the dead
  were reborn as monarchs,

  or because I am tired of staying home,
  or because my life is imperfect,
  though these things are true.
  I want to listen to their fluttering wings

  and return through the cobblestone streets
  of Valle de Bravo,
  and look back at the snow cap
  on the volcano Xinantecatl,

  so when I do stay home,
  the deep green pine forests
  and the snow cap and the volcano
  will also appear in my dreams.

  viii

  Your House in the Country

  No matter how many spiders and scorpions
  I smash with my sneaker on your bathroom tile
  or you living room rug,
  it never scares the rest away.

  ix

  Earliest Morning

  At three in the morning, it’s too late and too early.
  To the east the sun is burning a bush.
  A bird trills a melody of drowsiness and alarm.
  There are different ways
  for life to proceed in the darkness.
  At three in the morning,
  tomorrow and today are still the same day.

  x

  My Old Dog Opens His Eye

  I’m reading the Tibetan Book of Living and Dying
  which is mostly about the dying that all of us are doing,

  even you, lying there on the floor asleep
  or nearly so, until the moment I put this big book down,

  and somehow you know something’s happening,
  that I’m reaching out my hand

  like a thief in the night,
  but only to stroke the grey hair on your forehead,

  your big dark eye opening,
  and your tail beginning to beat against the carpet.

  xi

  Wisdoms

  Shantideva’s quatrain that talks you out of unhappiness
  goes more or less like this:
  Why be unhappy about something if it can be remedied,
  and if it can’t be remedied,
  there’s no point being unhappy about it either.
  This is one of those wisdoms
  that strike everyone as being profoundly true
  and just as profoundly unhelpful.

  xii

  Rattle

  The hospice nurse described
  the noise in your throat at the end of life
  predictively,
  as a death rattle.

  But then it sounded nothing like a rattle.
  The push of your exhalation and your inhaled gasps
  were never loose like grains inside a gourd
  or like the beads sealed in a tiny silver dumbbell

  with a newborn’s first, middle and last names
  inscribed in cursive.
  And it wasn’t like the interlocking rings
  at the end of a pit viper’s tail either,

  that tail tilted upward, shaking
  as it warns you off, though,
  as a signal,
  it turned out to be just as deadly.

  xiii

  November Day

  I’m in no mood to sit and stare at the walls today.
  But what else does the room have to offer?
  A rug, a tabletop.
  A book would open its stubby arms to me if I wanted that.
  Usually I take comfort there, but not today.
  My sister tells me she is recovering from a blues
  deep enough to be cobalt.
  My own are friendlier,
  no bluer than a cloudless winter sky
  around two in the afternoon.

  xiv

  Widowed

  I love the stars too fondly
  to fear the night.

  At least it’s nice to say so,
  distracted by light.

  My love is in the clouds now.
  She talks through the rain.

  When the skies are empty,
  she’s silent again.

  xv

  Widow

  What is there to say – you’ve been gone many years.
  So much has happened, things haven’t changed.
  I no longer see a bird hopping
  from the paving near the pool onto the metal gate
  and think, as I used to, it’s you, there you are.
  I have no reason to believe
  it will please you in any way to be remembered,
  but I still think so.

  xvi

  Now I Lay Me Down

  Pull the covers of the dark
  over my head.
  Let the floods come, I’m in the ark
  of a warm bed.

  The scars of the day are skin deep.
  They matter less
  than gratitude for a night’s sleep
  and happiness.

  Almost done, this high thread count life.
  Let the worms creep.
  I have the comfort of relief
  in a long sleep.

  xvii

  Options

  The last years have arrived in shades of blue.
  No longer far above,
  the heavens are just ahead of you.
  There are options you have your pick of:
  Trumpets, with or without.
  The almost closed or partially open gate.
  The brass or the iron wrought
  and the usual fate.

  xviii

  Inheritance

  What was my sister thinking
  buying this white Starbucks mug
  and placing it in the kitchen cabinet
  at the house we inherited from our father,
  who swore fifty years ago,
  standing inside a new Baskin Robins in Westchester,
  that he would never pay thirty-nine cents
  for an ice cream cone.

  xix

  Another Name

  If you are known, take another name,
  take any other, Rilke advised,
  so God can call you in the night.
  It’s a strange thing to say,
  maybe a warning, that we are trapped
  by who we think we are,
  unable to hear the call to something new.
  It could also mean, I suppose,
  to let go of what others think you are.
  And more than that, to let go
  of what you yourself pretend to be.

  xx

  Companion

  Talking to myself – only a sliver of moon is listening.
  Only the leaves of the oak pay attention.
  Sometimes that companion is the best one
  who never interrupts.

  Old age is like an empty theater.
  The spectators, that’s all they ever were, have left,
  most of them to go straight home,
  some, out for a drink first.
  You do have some clean up still to do
  before the next showtime,
  a production
  that will star someone else.

  xxi

  Colors

  After crossing Yosemite Sand
  you can dip your toe in Creekside Green

  at the paint store in my neighborhood,
  in a tour of the names of colors.

  Some routes may be difficult,
  but you may rest at English Manor.

  Need an education?
  Yale Blue or Oxford Blue, your pick.

  And then you can apply
  these conventions of naming

  to the morning world
  with its crepe myrtle and asphalt,

  which may require two coats of Dutch White air,
  glossy enough all day

  until the duller matte of the evening.
  And at night, when the sky lays its cover

  of Raven over your shoulders,
  the sheet of it will feel as light as feathers.

  xxii

  Mourning Dove

  I thought it was a morning dove,
  the plump grey bird that fluttered through the patio
  where we were having breakfast,
  but you corrected me.
  Mourning dove, you said.

  That was the same weekend
  you forgot to close the back door
  and a bird flew into your house,
  A Carolina wren,
  a small brown bird you couldn’t find again
  after searching every room.

  You opened the dining room windows
  and kept the back door open.
  You had me come over to help you look.

  It must have flown back out.
  You had no other explanation
  but declared the bird an omen
  of something bad, something major,
  maybe even of death.

  It’s plausible.
  You have a ninety-year-old mother,
  your boyfriend is seventy.
  Mourning is inevitable,
  if not by you, then for you,
  as inevitable as tomorrow morning.

  xxiii

  Mary Oliver

  Isn’t it a vainglory
  to see your personal story

  in nature –in birds, in shells, in rocks–
  on one of your long walks

  in some forest or by a shore.
  There you are, in a cold winter,

  you with your poetry robe on,
  keeping warm with an observation.

  I get it. You need a subject,
  and the snow geese will not object.

  xxiv

  Poet

  Virgil Suarez,
  poet of the little magazines,
  your name recurs
  more than your verses.

  You were as prolific as opuntia in the desert
  and hardier than the creosote.
  You were both the plant and the ploughman,
  working a ground that was mostly sand,
  home to salamanders,
  and where nettles were flowers.

  One year, when there was less than an inch of rain,
  you set about becoming other things:
  husband, father, widower, husband again,
  wage earner, businessman.
  And all that time you were saying to yourself,
  I am a poet.

  xxv

  Bills in the Mail

  I’ve had enough of their PO boxes and their explanations of terms;
  No more dotted lines, no more instructions to save this portion for my records.

  Do I have any questions?
  As if they would have answers.

  Rather than a slave to MasterCard or a life under the eye of Citi,
  I want to charge a timbrel that will take them all

  over cobblestoned streets through a rabble screaming for their heads,
  but only after I call (Toll Free), because they value my business.

  xxvi

  How The Rain Is Like The Chinese

  Dispatched from a cloud, each drop has its own falling
  from a great height, through the grey air, and silent as far as we know.

  Never a single scream, except at the very end,
  and then only muted.

  Try as you might to listen to the notes of raindrops,
  you only hear the collective sound of rain.

  xxvii

  Arguing In Santa Fe

  Talking things out?
  I might as well be talking to the snow
  or the jack rabbit that ran away at the first sound.

  I could be having this discussion with the pine trees,
  the stunted junipers that live at high altitudes,
  or with the stacked pinon, split in logs
  beside a brown adobe wall.

  I could always argue with the fire,
  but then I would have to go back inside.

  Better to talk to myself under the cold sky,
  talking things in, rather than out,
  which does no further harm,
  the unsounded words like the fragrance of burning pinon,
  no longer fuming
  as they disappear into the big ears of the clouds.

  xxviii

  Matchbooks

  Matchbooks are easy reads,
  mostly about restaurants or bars.
  When you open the cover,
  it’s the same story:

  twenty or so matches
  in layers as orderly as chapters,
  the fatheads white on top,
  no matter how young.

  I like the wooden ones
  that come in small coffin boxes
  from bars and nightclubs,
  and the redheads for their honesty.

  And they are practical.
  Close cover before striking, they say,
  using no unnecessary words,
  unlike so many books

  whose authors take their time,
  perhaps in the pursuit
  of a more ambitious objective,
  though shedding far less light on it.

  xxix

  Last Day

  There is always a last thing.
  A last look, a last try.
  A last day occurs not just each year
  but each day of the year.
  On my last day,
  the scalloped edge of the newspaper
  will provide its decorative border
  over the reports of catastrophic events
  that have already happened –
  the collapsed bridge, a knifing.
  Tragedy will be as it always was,
  yesterday’s news,
  but loss, like a newborn
  will cling to everything from the past,
  even to its pleasures.

  xxx

  Waterbug

  Although stillness is much praised,
  the water bug skates on the surface of the pond
  in praise of movement,
  zigzagging, as if writing a prescription in illegible script
  for the do-nothing blues.
  At the least, it is modeling the always vital task
  of being a moving target.

  xxxi

  Machine

  Man is only man at the surface. Remove his skin, dissect, and immediately you come to machinery. Valery

  That explains it, this morning’s mysterious sprocket,
  one of those wheely things with notches,
  on the floor of the shower.
  It must have fallen out of my nostril
  and either hit the tile without a sound,
  or the sound was hidden
  under the rush of water from the showerhead.

  I waited the rest of the day for some malfunction,
  some slippage, a loose rattling,
  but there was nothing, or nothing noticeable,
  nothing except the slight whir of thoughts spinning,
  as I swung slowly in the hammock,
  ideas as light as clouds,
  disengaged from the mechanical live oaks
  and the robotic squirrels,
  and going slowly nowhere as another evening descended,
  just back and forth,
  neither forward nor backward.

  xxxii

  Race

  Where are you running to with all the urgency
  of someone running away,
  late, out of breath,
  running toward that day

  that is coming to meet you even faster
  than you are moving toward it?
  That’s the day you’ll truly find yourself out of breath,
  though perhaps no longer tired.

  Gasping, as you run out of time,
  you will break
  through the finish line tape.
  That will be a peculiar moment,

  when the future will pass right through you
  and recede like an echo.
  And it will be clear to all concerned,
  not that many will be,

  that you had nowhere to run,
  same as the stones and the trees,
  the ashes in your pipe,
  the bark of your dog.

  xxxiii

  Containers

  Every morning the same thing –
  a pair of pants for a pair of legs,
  and a shirt, with its tubes for the arms,
  coffee circumscribed by a cup
  and the cereal by a bowl.

  Everything is contained in something
  larger than itself:
  the kitchen in the house,
  the house in the neighborhood,
  the city within the country within the continent.

  It’s all boundaries within boundaries,
  on a globe sheathed in air.
  Enjoy the day,
  the day that also fits into its container
  of eighty or ninety years,
  with the hinges attached to the top
  closing over everything.

  xxxiv

  What Then?

  If I’m not my thoughts, then what am I?
  I’m my knees in blue jeans.
  I’m the veins, those blue earthworms
  under the soil of skin on the back of my hands.
  I’m the grey hair on my head, what’s left of it.
  I’m the darker moles on my arm and the reddened, rough caps of my elbows.
  I’m the holes in two nostrils, and my breath, definitely that,
  soughing in and out of my open mouth,
  forming a word now and then, but mostly
  keeping busy just keeping me alive,
  as I keep my thoughts to myself.

  xxxv

  The Worst of Times

  The year her birth mother found my daughter,
  that was the worst year of my life.
  I knew that my heart would be broken
  and there would be no healing it.

  Actually, the worst was six years before that,
  the year my wife died in July, that was a bad one.
  She had back pain that January and went to a chiropractor.
  In February it turned out to be cancer.

  Before that, I thought the worst year of my life
  was my third year in college,
  when I wandered around the campus in a fog,
  before I dropped out.

  Then there was the time when I was fourteen,
  and my garage band buddies replaced me
  with someone more popular, who could also sing
  the Dave Clark Five tunes.

  By then, I had already forgotten the sorrows of being eleven.
  That’s when my father advised me
  that faced with any misery I should always ask,
  what will it matter, ten years from now?

  Maybe the worst year of my life hasn’t happened yet.
  I’m in my seventies, I may not be here
  ten years from now, and this may be the year
  I realize how right he was.

  xxxvi

  After Horace

  I hate embellishments.
  A woven garland doesn’t please me.
  I’m not interested in orchids,
  not even remotely.

  No care improves the bloom
  in my own backyard of the wild daisy.
  The gardener isn’t disgraced.
  Neither will I be.

  xxxvii

  After Baudelaire’s Cat

  Here, kitty, kitty, lie on top of me, and disguise
  your claws, since we’re alone.
  I want to dive into those dangerous eyes
  of yours, those pools of stone.

  When my fingers are stroking the fur
  of your long back, and you are ready to spring,
  I’m reeling with pleasure,
  feeling you quivering.

  I can see in you the image of my lover.
  The slits of her eyes are as cold as yours are,
  adorable pet,

  and from her head to her toes, there’s a net
  of intoxicating sin
  rising like a perfume from her skin.

  xxxviii

  In The Grocery Store

  When I see someone at the grocery store
  I haven’t seen in forever,
  we ask each other, “How are you?”
  They tell me their youngest has children in college,
  so we can gasp in surprise at the fact that time passes,
  as if it’s only then, in an aisle near the rosy apples
  and the spears of green asparagus so recently in the ground
  that the person I am greeting realizes
  her hair is white,
  or that life is a series of errands,
  trips to the grocery store,
  but not countless trips, and not an endless series.

  xxxix

  Describing The Flavor of The Month

  It was tart, like lime, but not the lime
  that’s known as a twist,
  the lime in the small white bowl on the bar,
  or between the bartender’s thumb and forefinger
  after he has already poured tonic over the gin
  and the two cubes of ice, no,
  this was more like the lime needed by unstable soils,
  the dolomitic quicklime, the hydrated lime,
  the lime bodies are doused with in gangster movies,
  corrosive lime, a lime the taste of which nobody ever enjoyed,
  tart or not,
  not while they were still alive.

  xl

  Unhappy Children

  They bound themselves to me by their distress.
  First, by their cries as infants,
  and later by their neverending crises.
  I have heard the bromide that parents are only as happy
  as their least happy child.
  It’s not true, it’s more complicated than that.
  I divide my children’s unhappiness
  by the distance between us,
  then multiply by some unknown constant,
  which is sometimes a measure of the headache,
  other times of the heartache.

  xli

  Furthest From Home

  The sandals from Japan are far from home on my floor.
  The rug in my office is far from the gift shop at the La Fonda Hotel,
  and even further from any Navajo weavers.
  The stemmed wineglass from Italy sits on my table,
  a blue ceramic coaster from Greece under it.
  But it’s the water in the wineglass that’s furthest from its origin,
  a cloud in the high heavens,
  swollen as a pillow on a dark afternoon.
  Where is it going next, this water,
  running toward my mouth from the tipped wineglass,
  slow at first, but then with abandon,
  as if suddenly discovering all the joys of gravity,
  and no longer caring, as if it ever did, what happens to it.

  xlii

  So Far

  So far, no slender volume of short stories,
  no first book of poems,
  no early triumphs that raised all expectations,
  which were met in the years to come.

  Instead, I have tentative titles,
  Water & Power or The Meter Reader,
  that one the story
  of my summer job in 1972.

  And there’s Dog’s Body,
  my unwritten memoir that could be a screenplay –
  its title, Good Boy,
  on the marquee at a neighborhood theater,

  the one that still has a marquee,
  its red plastic letters so fat and round
  even I will be able to make them out,
  despite old age and failing eyesight.

  xliii

  Wake

  This line is unexpected
  by us both,

  reader and writer
  in the same paper boat

  of the poem,
  carried down a stream,

  the both of us disappearing
  in its wake.

  xliv

  This Morning

  This is the morning I have decided once again
  to live one day at a time,
  after having tried unsuccessfully
  to live two days at a time.

  Also, accustomed to carrying the past with me
  years at a time,
  I am very much looking forward
  to this lighter load.

  Of course, even one day has its weighty problems.
  This morning I am already worrying
  about the afternoon,
  not to mention the dark night of the soul

  which is said to arrive at 3 a.m.,
  though in my experience it comes at any hour –
  even at eight or nine in the evening.
  Nothing I can do about that.

  My emphasis will be on living
  the run of my years as a single long day,
  or so I’m resolving,
  just as I did two days ago.

  xlv

  Toward the End

  There may be much to learn from the dying,
  but the lessons come in a class that requires prerequisites,
  none of which I’ve taken.
  Maybe dying is that dream I have heard about
  but never actually had,
  the one where you find yourself in a classroom
  although you are no longer in school.
  There’s a test to be taken but you are unprepared.
  You don’t have the number two pencil,
  or the sheet with the ovals,
  or alternatively that slender blue book
  where the answers, your essays, must be written.

  xlvi

  Barking Dog

  A truck passes, my dog barks.
  No, what actually happened was,
  my dog barked
  and, looking up, then I saw the truck.
  What is not like that,
  already there, but only noticed later.
  The shape of a leaf on the Japanese maple,
  the green on the grass, even happiness –
  all of it there all along, and all I need to see it
  is the barking dog.

  xlvii

  The March of Time

  Your years are marching
  with the precision of roman numerals
  marching down the page,
  the indented capital letters underneath them
  in the discipline of an alphabet,
  then the ordinal numbers also in their order,
  and last and least, small romans,
  as precise as the months,
  twelve of them in each year,
  and the twenty-four hours and their minutes,
  all those measures of the life
  that you meant to be full,
  even when it existed only in outline.

  xlviii

  Readers

  Who will ever ready any of this?
  My daughter, my reader? She hasn’t spoken to me in years.
  The son of my right hand, who shows no interest?
  My ancient mother has never opened a computer or used Microsoft Word.
  Maybe my girlfriend, who may marry me,
  unless she finds a winning lottery ticket first.
  That leaves you, Wally, my only dog, faithful as Achates,
  looking up at me from the rug.
  Your tail is beginning to show its sense of rhythm as I say your name.
  And, after your name and good boy, now that I have your attention,
  let’s begin with the alphabet, phonetics later.

  xlix

  Wind

  I can understand the science of it,
  air under higher pressure rushing into lower pressure.
  A commotion of molecules.
  Harder to answer where it came from exactly,
  and harder than that to know on a Saturday night
  where to hang your hat
  or whether to simply hold on to it.

  l

  After The Shipwreck

  If you are lucky enough to have the disaster happen in the daytime, and you have a timber to hold onto, you will have a chance to look back at the shipwreck, to catch the last glimpse of the boat as it disappears from view.

  But then, afloat on the ocean, bobbing with its rise and fall, and fearful of what will happen when darkness comes and there’s no moon, or how you will hold on to that spar of wood when you need to sleep, you still have some time to puzzle out what happened.

  You can rule out icebergs as the cause since you are in the topics.

  You can weigh the greater likelihood of mechanical failure or human error, but you have no real chance of knowing the answer.

  In the end, you might as well let go of trying to understand.
  No more grieving for what went wrong.
  It will be task enough to keep treading, even with the timber. Or, alternatively
  to float on your back, a chestful of air your only flotation device, your eyes fixed on the sky, and your breath the only breeze.

  li

  Classmates

  When did I come to the end of being the boy
  seated in front with his hand up,
  the boy who knew the answers and wanted to be called on,
  the one with the good head on his shoulders
  and the bright future?

  For what’s ahead, I don’t want to be called on.
  Those fidgety classmates who were always in the back row?
  I’m sitting with them now.
  We’re all doodling on sheets of paper or, having stayed up late
  and failed to do our homework,
  laying our towheads down on our arms,
  our knees trapped
  under desks that are too small.

  lii

  On The Side of the Road in November

  I could have stopped this morning for the dog lying on the side of the road.
  It was gone by the time I returned home.
  No telling in the dark whether a citizen had fetched it,
  or a city service, picking up the brown body,
  and removing it for disposal,
  the gifted athlete no longer swift,
  no more wagging, no more straining on a taut leash,
  off of that leash for good.

  liii

  I May Have Read This

  Faith is the strength to turn waiting for something
  into looking for something.
  It sees the papery skin of the finite
  and feels beneath it for the bones of the infinite.

  liv

  Life Story Sonnet

  When you reach that page in your story
  where you discover you have lived an ordinary life,
  you are only a thousand words away from understanding
  there’s nothing you can do about it.

  From there, it may take no more than a paragraph
  to no longer want to.
  No hero, and no new characters.
  Nothing but the pages and the punctuation.

  You may even be bored enough to skip ahead
  to the end, turning to that very last page,
  or to the end paper
  of the inside back cover, that plain white rectangle

  amazingly similar to the very first page,
  as clean and as uninscribed.

  lv

  Counting Syllables

  They knew in Athens how a stretched string could produce a musical note
  the pitch of it in proportion to the length of string,
  the intervals between pleasing sounds in ratios of simple numbers.
  Falling under the spell of numbers, a writer might create music, too,
  stringing a count of syllables together so they vibrate.
  What reading other writers tells you is that anything is possible,
  though not everyone should be published
  or should want to be.

  lvi

  Nines

  Pull away the pedestal that all
  your wisdoms rest on, before they fall

  of their own weight and break in pieces.
  Try to tell the truth in plain phrases.

  If that’s too hard, then write the poem
  like this one, which has no larger aim

  than to hold nine or ten syllables
  in lines that are rows of tinkling bells.

  Try to make them nearly rhyming pairs.
  Cook up, if you can, fresh metaphors.

  And try write as you live, meaning
  the best you can, and maybe a song

  will come out, something that deserves praise,
  though that’s rare, and always a surprise.

  lvii

  End Of The Line

  The only child she had, had only one child, who never married.
  So, end of the line.

  And so she wasn’t Sarah or Rebecca or Leah.
  Her descendants won’t be numerous as the stars in the sky.

  She wasn’t Eve either, the mother of two,
  though one of them was a murderer.

  How proud could Eve have been,
  with Cain as her living son?

  With few or no other mothers around to ask her
  how are the kids doing,

  maybe it wasn’t so bad.
  She could keep the grief to herself.

  lviii

  Eager To Please

  His dog heart beats fifty percent faster than mine.
  Eager to please, at least he seems to be.
  He also seems confused how that might be accomplished.
  He cocks his head, as if wondering what do I want,
  with my repetitions of directions.
  And wags his tail even faster, using up those rapid heartbeats,
  of which he has, as do I, only an allotment.

  lvix

  How It Is Sometimes

  If I could hear the voice of God in the breezes,
  that would be divine.
  If I could see the face of God in running water,
  that would be revelation.
  Maybe terrifying, too, if not crazy-making.
  Probably better just to hear and see the wind and the water.

  lx

  Puzzle

  First breath, last breath, those are the bookends.
  In between, the days that seem countless but aren’t,
  the breaths when I lie down and when I rise up,

  the school days, then earning a living, then resting –
  fingertips on the rail of that span that bridges over one abyss
  and leads to another.

  What to do is always a puzzle.
  Even more so, how to do something else,
  when the straight edges of your jigsaw are already in place.

  lxi

  Late Night Discussion

  He follows me one more time from bedroom to kitchen.
  Blind as he is in old age and mostly deaf,
  he still has sense enough.
  The metronome of his tail still works.
  His toenails can drum the floor.
  And his nose can still answer the big questions.

  Come over to me, old friend.
  Let’s you and I discuss these questions into the night.
  Warm milk in my hand, a milkbone under your paw,
  let’s settle the mystery of the difference
  between fur and hair,
  and whether that black speck on your belly is a flea or,
  in my opinion, only a speck.

  lxii

  Two By Nine

  It’s Christmas Day and also Thursday,
  the way most things are two things at once.

  The sky this morning looks like heaven
  and an endless grey emptiness.

  Both are likely within the compass
  of possibility, are equal

  interpretations, a one plus one
  that add to each other,

  if it isn’t also fair to say
  the two subtract and equal zero.

  lxiii

  More News

  What is happening in those distant countries?
  Wars, uprisings, innocent throats cut by the Janjaweed,
  who ride into villages in South Sudan on horseback.
  All of it happening as we speak or remain silent,
  occupied or preoccupied
  our pots of water boiling on the stove,
  the sticks of our pasta softening into noodles,
  the heads of crisp lettuce, and our knife
  breaking the shiny skin of a tomato.

  lxiv

  Song

  Summer burns the land to zero.
  Now the grass is withered, dry.
  The bird that sang hello hello
  barely has the strength to fly.

  lxv

  Opposites

  The assignment was to write a sentence so true even its opposite is true.
  So I wrote life’s a mystery, breath miraculous, and death an illusion.

  lxvi

  To The Brugmansia

  Brugmansia, small tree,
  I know you, fragrant in the evening,
  your flowers pendulous and trumpet shaped,
  your blooms white, yellow, pink, and red.
  All your parts are poisonous.
  You induce violent trance, sickening aftereffects, temporary insanity.
  Even the loss of awareness that I am hallucinating,
  and then forgetfulness of the episode.
  I know you, Brugmansia.
  You are the tree of life.

  lxvii

  Walking Lesson

  The straining to be free of the worn leather leash baffles me, the pointless exertion, the flurry of barks, from the first mention that we’re going on one of our walks. What’s the point, what’s the thrill, as he tucks his head down and goes nosing through the grass, panting like the wolf he probably was.

  Apparently there’s joy on all fours, and it’s just past the driveway, if you keep your furry head and belly near the ground, and turn your back on the sky.

  lxviii

  Volume II, Harvard’s Five-Foot Shelf of Books, Edition Deluxe

  What is there to learn from these meditations of Aurelius?
  Vanity and celebrity have always had their day.

  In a paperback world, this hardback is decorous,
  Veritas on its imitation leather cover,

  gold in its design,
  and its endpapers imitating the marble

  from a quarry that might have produced the stone
  for the bust used as the frontispiece.

  The bust is titled Emperor Marcus Aurelius.
  His blank marble eyes look off to one side

  in that timeless human gaze that signals interiority,
  a look still used by novelists or rock musicians

  who want to suggest that something’s on their mind.
  Teenagers use it, too, on family vacations,

  when they refuse to look straight into the camera and smile
  in response to their parents’ command,

  as if to say with that same look,
  Fuck you! I’m an Emperor!

  lxix

  I Took a Photo of My Mother at the Mortuary

  What’s going on? I can’t describe it.
  As my mother descends, I am leaving all description
  to a camera in my cell phone.
  With the push of my finger, its shutter
  pushes out of the way my thousands of words.

  At the end of days
  is a phrase so beautiful it masks all meaning.
  It reminds me of the mother-of-pearl on a seashell.
  And I can hear in its chamber
  both the hallowing and the harrowing.

  lxx

  Capitalizing

  Not unlike Miss Emily Dickenson,
  my father used to Capitalize words at random
  in the handwritten notes he Sent me
  from time to Time
  which he might Enclose with an article
  from Newsweek or the local paper.
  He always Printed, too.
  I don’t believe I ever saw his handwriting,
  other Than on the signature
  that he applied to the Power of Attorney
  and to his Medical Directive.

  lxxi

  My Father’s Nose

  One of these days and more likely at night,
  my unenchanted mirror whispered the truth.
  It was only yesterday that I was too young,
  and now I’m too old.
  How did that happen?
  The skin’s wintry on the back of my hand,
  and this morning I woke up to find my father’s nose
  in the middle of my face.

  lxxii

  Oscar Night

  The pleasures of watching the Oscars
  at my girlfriend’s house,
  include making the long sit toward Best Picture
  on her couch instead of mine.
  Then, after that terrible waste of a Sunday night,
  there’s the quiet soundtrack of drive back in the dark
  to a house edited of any residue of those three and half hours,
  and the fanfare of my dog,
  his tail thumping against the foyer wall,
  greeting me with all the emotion of a best supporting actor
  thanking the Academy.

  lxxiii

  The Thrill Is Gone

  The piquancy of the cola goes flat, its sweet becoming sickening.
  The poetry turns into prose, interesting but that’s all.
  The thrill is gone.
  That’s what the great bluesman concluded,
  his own playing turning repetitious over the years, predictable –
  at first only to him,
  and then, sometime later, to everyone.

  lxxiv

  To The Cemetery

  I could go by car, but why?
  Better to walk, and take the long way.

  From here, my resting place is only a mile.
  Even so, it should take a while

  to get there, if I can just slow the pace.
  And, as you know, this is the race

  where coming in last is the goal,
  or very late, if possible.

  lxxv

  Poetry

  I keep on trying.
  It’s either therapy or madness,
  given that I can’t sing
  or confess.

  What are they for,
  these poems, most of which,
  I admit, are a bore.
  Just the scratch of an itch,

  sometimes a prayer
  to please God,
  their only likely reader,
  however unlikely they would.

  lxxvi

  For Christopher Ma

  There you are in the column, not in alphabetical order, but according to the year of graduation, as they do it in alumni publications.

  On the same page as you, some guy who spent a few years at Banker’s Trust before joining his wife’s family’s business, where he rose to become president and changed the name of the business to his own five years later.

  I can’t help but notice he leaves only a brother.

  And did you know the guy right above you, the “talented schoolboy athlete”? He left the College after a year and headed west to live the life of a blacksmith, cowboy, and carpenter in Colorado and California, and then pursued a career, if that’s what it was, in construction and, later, as a “master craftsman.”

  In a piquant addition, it says he was a voracious reader who returned to the College at 60 – that’s my age now – hoping, or so it says, to fulfill a lifelong ambition to become high-school history teacher, although illness intervened.

  And then your name, Chris. I remember you from a class we took together, where you passed me a copy of George Saintsbury’s History of English Prosody. No mention of that in your obituary. Instead, I learn that you were a senior vice president, an innovative pioneer, and I can read the names of those you left, Nathalie, Olivia – “leaving,” as though they were something you could return to.

  lxxvii

  In the Transcendental Meditation Class

  It was in a strip shopping center, but upstairs,
  above a restaurant that serves enchiladas and margaritas.
  Each of us had a word.
  We were to repeat it to ourselves for the sake of its sound,
  as we sat on chairs or shared the couch,
  our eyes closed, our minds like unleased spaces.

  I was thinking, my girlfriend loves Jesus and has green eyes.
  Green, like a salsa verde,
  and also intoxicating, like tequila,
  and piquant, yes, as piquant as any ring of salt.

  lxxviii

  Atheists

  I agree with the atheists.
  The god that speaks no longer exists,

  the one who created the forbidden apple
  and our desire to eat it as well,

  that god retired to the garden
  after we left, after we were done

  learning about Good and more about Evil.
  He misses us on his endless days, though only a little,

  as he trims branches on our trees of life,
  pruning some with a sigh and others with a laugh.

  lxxix

  Farid

  Who named you, Farid, and in what country?
  It was someplace with the sun glaring
  on the white walls of the houses,
  and with dust on the roads.

  Maybe it was a fragrance she remembered
  when your mother gave you your name,
  a bloom dispersed, the scent lost, and when she tried to recall it
  your name came to her.

  Or it was the flavor of a dish in your father’s memory,
  flavored with the salt of an ocean,
  that nourishing broth
  feeding him as he fed it to you.

  lxxx

  No Questions

  The trees in the yard never once
  asked what is the plan.
  They have no questions.

  If the white egrets or the blue herons
  walking in the creek bed ever wondered
  why they are here,

  they kept it to themselves, disinterested
  in these mysteries.
  When I asked them anyway,

  they rose with untroubled hearts
  and took to the air, sensing my presence
  and not wanting my company.

  lxxxi

  Health Hazard

  After reading an article about it
  one lonely night,
  the idea that loneliness is a health hazard
  seemed intuitively true.
  Though whether the threat is more like a cold
  caught on a summer day,
  or the pneumonia that the elderly person
  might succumb to,
  or the persistent heartburn
  that will presage cancer of the esophagus
  one percent of the time,
  I can’t say,
  and the author chose not to reveal.

  lxxxii

  Dog Years

  I’ve caught up with my dog at last.
  He has his dog years, and I have my old age.
  Time has caught up with both of us.
  No one’s going to call me good boy any longer.
  His dog days are almost over too.
  As for those that we have left, mine seem shorter and darker.
  They are going by faster,
  as if I were the one running just as he used to do
  in a vacant field, ears bent back and fur flying,
  running from the darkening behind me,
  and also running toward it.

  lxxxiii

  Reading On The Balcony

  How is a breeze born?
  Does it come from the labor of the air?
  And who hears the cry it makes as it enters the world?
  If it makes a sound, it must be slighter
  than the hum of the wasp that keeps bothering me
  on this balcony deck,
  softer than the rock of my chair,
  and quieter even than the pages that are turning,
  one after another,
  in the book I keep trying to read
  despite all the noise.

  lxxxiv

  Eschatology

  The day ends gradually and then all at once.

  Just so I imagine the world will end, imperceptibly at first and then absolutely, though not today, and not this weekend either.

  At least through tomorrow, the world will go on forever, the robin on the birdfeeder, the squirrels chasing each other around the trunk of the red oak, and the endless circle of opinions about life, death, and how life after death came to be called the afterlife.

  lxxxv

  Russian Dolls

  If every moment depends on the moment before,
  then at my first yawn this morning
  I might have heard midnight concealed within it,
  the smallest of the Russian dolls
  of the hours ahead.

  Taking this further in the opposite direction,
  in the first cries of a newborn,
  I could listen for the wailing of all his days to come,
  and maybe hear the sob (but only if he’s lucky)
  from the mourner at his grave.

  lxxxvi

  Mosquito

  There’s an intensity to its rising hum.
  The closer it gets to my ear, the more it sounds like a scream.
  Is this blood lust?
  It has the urgency of lust
  but it may only be an understanding
  of the brevity of its life, the few hours it has left,
  and possibly, as I raise my hand,
  the few seconds.

  lxxxvii

  My Mother At Ninety-Six

  When I told her of my wonder
  at her lack of gratitude for her longevity,
  you know, that great gift she has been granted
  by whoever’s hand holds the thread or wields the scissors that do the cutting,
  she said there’s nothing metaphorical about it.
  Ninety-six is not a number on a scale weighted with memories.
  She isn’t clutching any coin to give a ferryman
  who will take her across a dark river.
  Instead, she refuses to leave the house
  and lives in her bathrobe,
  which is a thicker cover than the bruised skin that covers her bones.
  She eats meals, she watches television, and resents the fate
  that afflicts her with another day.

  lxxxviii

  More Wisdom

  See no difference between gain and loss, good news and bad news – that’s one of the many wisdoms. It could be the primary one, if the goal is indifference, sometimes represented by the Buddha, though it could just as well be represented by the cat.

  lxxxix

  March 12, 2018

  Nokie Edwards died today in Yuma, Arizona.
  Another nail in the coffin of my California boyhood.
  Lead guitarist for the Ventures,
  although on “Walk, Don’t Run,” that greatest hit,
  with its backstairs intro,
  first and fourth fingers of the left hand
  sliding up and then down the fourth and fifth strings,
  Nokie only played bass.

  In those days I was all about running.
  And I was certain that the only direction worth going was away,
  leaving boyhood and beach towns behind,
  without a clue then just how much someday
  I would want to walk it back.

  xc

  Evaluation

  As I get older it becomes clearer
  how unexceptional I am,
  marrying for richer or poorer,
  dying sooner or later,
  using the same thirty or so words
  to repeat myself.

  I have nothing more to say,
  despite the time to say more.
  There’s bad breath in these words.
  This is a defect of their birth.
  Midnight was their mother,
  the father is unknown.

  xci

  Ugly Baby

  I was never a beautiful baby.
  I was an ugly one.
  So my father told me,
  and my mother had no comment.
  She came up with her own reasons to be disappointed.
  She was a reader, and I never wrote to her.
  I made money, she discounted it.
  If I was her mirror,
  what was I to my father?
  A book he had half written,
  but never read.

  xcii

  Inquiries

  These are the inquiries from heaven:
  What have you done with what you were given?

  Have you finished the work of your hands?
  Or did you idle between the bookends

  of time past and time ahead,
  times remembered and the time of dread.

  xciii

  I Hear You

  Birdsong is repetitive to my poor ear,
  as if a bird has nothing more to say.
  And I find it tiresome
  hearing this, day after day.

  But then maybe the same notes repeat
  because the bird knows truly
  what humans are unwilling to admit,
  even over a lifetime,

  that no matter how clever we may be,
  a few notes are all there is to say,
  all we need to say,
  and all that we can hear.

  xciv

  Either Way

  The years are a train, the present pulling the past behind it.
  Each day is also the birthday of the world, when even the past is new.
  Either way, life is in motion.
  There can be understanding, and even acceptance,
  if you can get there.
  It was also in the spirit of the sage
  that you should carry two notes,
  one in each pocket,
  one that says for your sake the world was created,
  and the other, you are but dust and ashes.
  Or so the sage was quoted in Polish,
  or maybe in Yiddish.

  xcv

  Old Age

  It has taken until this season
  to talk in the first person,
  to speak simply,
  to look things, as it were, in the eye.
  Head balding, hands spotted,
  diminished enough,
  tired of love
  and its old song,
  with so few years ahead,
  I’m at the center of my circle,
  I don’t know it all,
  but I know where I belong.

  xcvi

  Birth and Death

  Evening began,
  and evening went away.
  Then it was morning, the first day,
  according to plan.

  Life stops on a dime,
  the end of the world as we know it.
  And so what?
  A world is ending all the time.

  xcvii

  Greater Than

  Its two equal lines are an arrow
  pointing to the right,
  like a nose sniffing at the lesser thing.
  It sizes what’s to its left as well,
  without looking both ways.

  The number of birds is greater than
  the names of birds,
  both of them greater than the names
  I can remember
  of the birds I have forgotten.

  xcviii

  Grandfathers

  Some praise for my grandfathers,
  both of them movers

  from shtetl streets.
  Their footfalls became my heartbeats.

  Both were boys when they left the bloodlands.
  Thank you, thank you from your bloodline.

  I’m here, standing my ground.
  Still above it, still around.

  xcix

  At The Top

  After reaching the top of the very last rise,
  who says, no regret?
  The view from here would open the eyes
  of anyone not here yet.
  You’ll see in the sharp slope of the descent
  what the climb meant.

  c

  In Search of the Miraculous

  Tears fall for joy and for sorrow.
  today for newborns, for the dead tomorrow.

  No one can say the last word,
  No one can see that far forward.

  Still, the miraculous could be anywhere,
  Angels are hiding in the air.

  ci

  Ambition

  To get the gold ring
  you had to want the thing.
  From an early age
  you worked to gain advantage
  over the competition.
  There were plenty of trophies to win,
  even a grand prize.
  And from the look in your eyes,
  you had the discipline.
  So you got to the head of the line.
  Then what happened?
  Something came round the bend,
  and you saw the end.

  cii

  Training

  To believe you can teach a child
  you need to believe he has more in common
  with a dog than with anything wild,
  and that this child isn’t a stone —
  some object that cannot be taught how to act.
  Also that he’s not just any dog, but one
  of above average intellect —
  an Australian cattle dog, or a standard poodle.
  Even then, you have to accept as fact,
  that, sometimes, no matter how many times you call,
  your dog may not want to listen.
  He will not come, sit, stay, or fetch a ball.
  It may be better at those times to just count to ten,
  and then give up, and let the dog win.

  ciii

  My Mother and Father Had Different Attitudes Towards Their Own Deaths

  Both my parents lived into their nineties.
  My mother was at ease with her last breath.
  My father not so. Damaged by disease,
  he died protesting the terms of his own death.

  Maybe he was despairing.
  He may have regretted the routine of the life he led.
  He may have had heartbreaks he wasn’t sharing.
  Still, if he was tired of life, he never said.

  They both lived through the Depression and the War.
  They married, and then stuck with it all the way.
  But only my father wanted to live forever,
  or longer, or just one more day.

  civ

  After Me

  In the rooms where I reside
  the furniture will survive me,
  even the ashtrays, after I’ve died.
  My Moroccan rug, the Italian chairs,
  are comfortable as natives.
  They’ll stay as if the house were theirs.
  And my oil paintings will be
  on a wall all their lives.
  Maybe not my books however,
  or my clothing and other discards.
  Some keepsakes might appear
  at the garage sale afterwards,
  like a handful of my postcards
  from Prague, or my porcelain cat.
  My poor porcelain cat!
  She came all the way from Kyoto!
  May she bring good fortune and praise
  to the local Japanese restaurant
  in the strip center she will go to,
  may she keep her white paw raised,
  on a shelf, near a plant.

  cv

  For An Application

  The request is for a biography.
  Be brief, make it a bio.

  You made a career of pretending.
  It made you a fortune.

  Ten thousand days commuting,
  a million cups of coffee.

  Don’t leave out the Harvard degree.
  Or the lifetime achievement award.

  Only one wife would be best,
  though multiple is what happened.

  Done with earning a living?
  Bring the narrative to an end.

  The rest of life, how you went on,
  where you decided to live,

  much less why or to what age,
  no one needs to read that page.

  cvi

  Crickets on a Night Hike

  The guide carried a flashlight with a red lens,
  as stargazers do,
  though we were mostly looking at our feet
  to keep from tripping.

  From time to time he stopped to point
  his light on the path,
  on the three-leafed ivy at its edge,
  or the Virginia creeper hugging the trunk of a burr oak,
  grapevines, stout as ropes,
  and the boughs of a bois d’arc.

  After a descent, we came to a field of prairie grass
  revealed in moonlight.
  Mostly there was no talking, which led one of us to remark
  on this night lively with their singing,
  how odd is was that the word crickets
  would mean silence.

  cvii

  Days

  Days divined, like a dream.
  Days like water, days like cream.
  Perfect days, days immodest,
  undressed
  even as late as noon.
  Days that end far too soon.
  Days when what I intend to do, I do.
  Last days, sad, true.

  How was your day? I’m asked that,
  as if days divide by lean and fat.
  They don’t. Days, be a friend.
  Overstay your welcome. Never end.
  Even at the last, open a door.
  All I will want from you is one more.

  cviii

  Busy Busy

  There’s no sparrow under heaven
  with nothing to do.
  It feeds, it’s preyed upon,
  it flies from or to.

  And the lily? It works a summer hour
  after the sprinklers run,
  drinking the water
  and tilting toward the sun.

  Even rocks keep busy.
  They provide shelter or some shade.
  Lift them up, you’ll see
  the homes ants have made.

  So what are you worrying about,
  staying in bed this morning,
  no need to doubt,
  you’re doing something.

  cix

  Whitman

  If I do it at all, I must delay no longer.
  So Whitman wrote, gathering those jottings
  he collected as specimens of his days,
  and then he added,
  Let the melange’s lackings and wants
  take care of themselves.

  Delay, that’s what I’m doing this mélange of a day.
  I’ve made no list and crossed nothing off it.
  My eyes are on the clock.
  And if there’s a prize, it’s either hidden,
  doesn’t really exist, or has already been won
  by somebody else.

• Unwritten Poems

  i

  At The Turn of The Year

  Romania at year end 1989, Ceausescu and his wife are shot.

  Pieces of the Berlin Wall are being sold as stocking stuffers and souvenirs in New York

  Poland, Czechoslovakia, the names in the newspaper at the turn of the year,
  are names from the news fifty years ago.

  Here in Dallas, the weather turns colder than it has been in fifty years.
  Pipes burst, and the plumbers are accepting only cash.

  ii

  My Son at Seven Years Old

  In Moscow they tore down the statue of the founder of the KGB this morning.
  Nevertheless, I’m still driving you to your private school, where you will be detained and
  questioned.
  Your teachers have ways of making you talk, but haven’t discovered how to keep you quiet.
  They teach you to count, and want to count on you to behave.
  You need to learn the pledge, which you have, though your alliances are suspect.
  You are learning to sit still; also, the order of the planets that revolve constantly around the
  sun.
  But you have a disorder that is unresolved.
  They suggest drugs, stimulants, anti-anxiety pills, and another school.
  They are the rule and you are only the exception.
  Maybe you are bored learning cursive, or the numbers through one hundred, or the habits of
  mammals.
  Maybe you are dysfunctional.
  Maybe you don’t give a fuck, or you like seeing your name on the chalkboard, followed by a
  check, then a second, then a third.
  Who knows? I know they don’t.
  Life isn’t school, though it must be passed.
  And if sometimes you do have to sit, stay, heel, fetch, shake hands and roll over, it’s only if you
  want their biscuit.
  Here’s a tip, not that you will take it:
  Ask only questions they can answer, answer only questions you are asked.
  You will always be welcome at home, where you spend your time after school drawing turtles
  and ninja weapons and whatever else your hand devises.
  You can leave for later or for never the graded exercises that are due tomorrow.
  About tomorrow no one has a clue.

  iii

  Alumni

  The obituaries at the back of this month’s alumni magazine seem more notable than the
  feature article about the brilliant graduate assistant in the university lab, a Chinese researcher
  with her doctorate in applied mathematics who is changing the world.

  As always, I look first at my year:

  There’s the standout schoolboy athlete, who earned eight varsity letters in track and field and
  was named an All-State quarterback at high school in Ohio, where his record for discus still
  stands.

  There’s the one who left the College in his sophomore year, making his way to San Francisco,
  where at age 24 he co-founded a magazine and built its readership from zero to a quarter
  million in no time, and who also became fundraiser and advocate for causes, starting a firm
  raising millions for Greenpeace, the Sierra Club and the ACLU.

  And the one who suffered from multiple sclerosis for much of his adult life; when he was forced
  to use a wheelchair, he decided it was time to return and complete his degree, which he did.
  He leaves a sister, Patti. His life partner, David, predeceased him.

  In his next life he might want to meet the classmate who left the College after his freshman
  year, finishing his undergraduate degree at a university in California, and then came back east
  to live in Martha’s Vineyard, working as a carpenter and boat-builder. His passion was for
  surfing, which led him back to the Pacific and across to Hawaii, then to the Cook Islands and
  finally New Zealand. There with his wife he made a farm in the hills of Hikurangi on the North
  Island, where they grew their own vegetables, harvested fruits and nuts from their orchard, and
  lived a simple, honest, and creative life off the grid. He leaves his wife, Sakura, his mother
  Emma Cabot, his sister, Cabot, and Bud, his brother.

  So the alumni magazine informs me, with its obituaries and reminders of that perfect place
  where I was out of place when I was eighteen. After graduating with highest honors, I wrestled
  with living and earning a living, with God and with man. There is no knowing whether or not I
  prevailed or remained wedded to self-deception.

  iv

  Conversation of the Souvenirs

  The porcelain Lucky Cat raises its paw, waving goodbye to China. The golden, wafer-thin snake
  from the King Tut exhibit gift shop, mounted on its acrylic cube, hisses nearby. There’s Frieda
  Kahlo with her monobrow on a picture postcard. What a conversation they could be having
  after lights out, when the whole house is quiet. They live near each other on the shelves of the
  same bookcase. Unlike inmates housed in adjacent cells, they do not need to tap with a cup on
  the cell’s cement walls in order to communicate, though there is a cup available on a lower
  shelf. It is a souvenir, too, from Oskar Schindler’s enamel factory in Krakow. Their topic of
  conversation? They could talk about their homesickness. Lucky Cat might have something to
  say about the fickleness of fortune. And all of it would fall on the deaf ears of the woodcut
  propped on a top shelf. It is a print of two faces cheek to cheek, with a line of Thoreau’s along
  the top of the frame and the second line of the aphorism along the bottom, declaiming it takes
  two to speak the truth, one to speak and another to hear.

  v

  The Window

  Between the time when you are too young, and the day you decide that you are too old, a small
  window opens. Excuses can still come in through it, but you don’t have to accept them or even
  greet them, with a feint hello.

  vi

  Debutante

  Multiple forks and knives and spoons, the plates on chargers, and the linen napkins in porcelain
  rings. She places your salad knife on the edge of your salad plate as she eats. She was taught
  to do so by someone who was taught to do so. She believes in it. No elbows on the table, no
  lowering one’s face toward one’s plate.

  vii

  Afterlife

  There’s this idea that we’ll understand everything after we die, as if the rules are printed on the
  inside of the box.

  viii

  Mood

  I’m told by a therapist that I should try an anti-depressant, one a day, like a vitamin. I’m told
  my problems may be of childhood origin. I’m as inclined to believe it’s the vacancy of the sky
  on a Sunday afternoon, which stays overhead, like a nothing that nothing can fill. But there are
  as many reasons as there are hours, and none of them are good. I can still speak the truth,
  even if there’s no one to hear it.

  ix

  Clinging

  The fig ivy clings to the brick as if its life depended on it. It leaps the sill and comes right up the
  window. At night the lamplight shines on it. Pale green, its leaves are the shapes of mouths on
  the glass. And then there are the moths, beating at the same hard glass. For them, attracted
  to lamplight, the glass is bewilderment and frustration.

  x

  High School Graduates

  My son hates school and is also afraid of leaving home. He says he doesn’t want to go to
  college. He receives the typical response that lots of young people feel that way and, besides,
  you’re still in high school and don’t have to go today.
  But he means it.
  Maybe he’ll work at one of those hardware stores with a hundred helpful employees, grown
  men who spend their days finding a homeowner the right molly bolt, measuring lengths of
  rope, or standing in the plumbing aisle.
  He’ll have his dreams but will play video games and watch TV.
  He’ll take his paycheck out of its white envelope, tear it at the perforations, and wonder about
  all the deductions.
  He’ll keep beer in the refrigerator at his apartment. When his car needs a repair, it will be a
  crisis. He’ll make the minimum payment on his credit card and pay the interest rates. He won’t
  go to the doctor once a year or to the dentist ever.
  He’ll have his friends. Someone may love him.
  One day, it will be over, just as it will for the editor of the high school newspaper, the point
  guard scouted by Indiana, and the valedictorian, the one who gives the speech on the promise
  of the future awaiting everyone in the graduating class.

  xi

  Where It Is From

  The clock on the table in my library stopped. So I set the hands to the eleventh hour and left
  them there. The table is a copy of a table from France in the nineteen thirties. That was a bad
  time, too, though its furniture is still stylish, even in the veneered version. The clock belonged
  to my first wife, and the table came from the Roxy on Greenville Avenue. Everything comes
  from somewhere, and everything has its time.

  xii

  After Disciplining Wally

  He is eager to get back inside. Though I had put him out in anger, he has forgotten the injustice
  or forgiven it or just doesn’t care. He wants nothing this moment beyond coming back in the
  house; then, to be scratched behind his head.

  A barker, he has no ability to lower his voice. So, if he has secrets, he could not whisper them.

  He is happy enough in his collar. He has tags in case he gets lost. But when he is lost, it is only
  because he has escaped, running out an open gate. He doesn’t run because he is a bad dog,
  but for the sake of being on new grass, the neighbor’s, or further away.

  I admire his enthusiasm and wish I could share it, but I don’t have paws or a wet black nose to
  follow.

  xiii

  Marriage

  This isn’t what I had in mind when I married. What I have on my mind now is peaceful
  coexistence, the way sovereign states, their borders more or less secure, learn to put their
  weapons away.

  Maybe I can mediate the differences, agree on the shape of the table, begin peace talks and,
  after years of shuttling to and from one ornate room after another, arrive at a broad green
  lawn for a signing ceremony, still wary, each of us recognizing the other’s foreignness, but
  agreeing to an end of outward hostilities.

  We might then kiss each other first on one cheek and then on the other, diplomatically.

  xiv

  Anthrax in the News

  Someone is sending anthrax through the mail.
  It must be terrifying to find a white powder spilling on the kitchen table, from the opened
  envelope with no return address, even if the simple organisms are as innocent as the
  vegetables in the cans my mother used to open, beans at so many removes from any garden
  that even their green was theoretical.

  xv

  Lesson

  What I learned teaching my dog to heel, sit, and stay is that commands cannot be questions.
  Also, that the desire to please, so essential for obedience, cannot compete with the pleasure of
  strange grass.

  xvi

  Music

  The piano is so heavy it takes two men to remove it. It’s a beast, with its fat wooden legs and
  its black top like a jawbone. It knows more than it is saying, neglected by children who have left
  their lessons and refuse to practice.

  xvii

  Hammock

  It’s common enough to compare our internal life to an object in the observable world. Joy
  soars like a bird. Grief is a shadow. We try to make the unseen visible.

  For example, when I am in a hammock, fastened between two hickory trees, my thoughts are
  like fish, slippery and too small to be caught in the hammock’s netting.

  Better to leave them that way, in the watery air, imagined and unseen, rather than held in my
  hand, a hook in their mouths, gasping and unintelligent.

  I don’t need to see my thoughts like that, at the moment of their deaths.

  xviii

  Backyard

  Reciting the names of my trees: hickory, cedar elm, red oak. This could be a parlor game, if I
  had a parlor. Sweet gum, live oak, yaupon and Nellie Stevens hollies. Those last two might be
  shrubs, since they are smaller, and I do not know the dividing line between tree and shrub.
  Smaller still, the flowers in my yard: coreopsis, Turk’s head, salvia, zinnia, daisies. And last, the
  backyard plants that no not flower: coleus, sweet potato vine. Are these flowers? Or just
  plants?

  Remembering the names, then forgetting them. I live on Bachman Creek, but it might as well be
  Lethe, the river of forgetfulness. Forgetting, a classical image of death; and, for most of us
  passing over it, an emblem of being forgotten.

  xix

  Aster

  It’s in the nature of everything written to have a subject, to be about something, even if that
  thing is nothing more than a roadside flower. And if that flower isn’t an aster, it makes no
  difference to the writing, which is more influenced by the lateness of the hour, fatigue, posture,
  the angle of the keyboard, or the syncopated splatter of raindrops on the skylight and the
  bitterness of tobacco, each of these factors is as mysterious as the star pattern of the aster,
  which could be glimpsed in passing from a two-laned, black-topped road in East Texas, but
  wasn’t, the unnoticed flower nodding on its stem.

  xx

  At The Dentist’s

  I like the chair, with its footrest in the shape of a lozenge. I like leaning back, like the celebrant
  at a ceremony, my head tilted, my mouth agape. Of all the chairs in life – the easy chairs,
  dining room chairs, office chairs on wheels, even the barber’s chair, this is the one in the most
  deliberate position, within spitting distance of a white porcelain bowl.

  xxi

  For a Young Daughter

  True, you have never belonged to me, but when you leaned against me during concluding
  services of our High Holy Days, while the cantor chanted Hebrew tunes of praise, I put my arms
  around you like a shawl, my fingers like fringes, and I prayed for our futures.

  xxii

  Dog and Waterbug

  Although stillness is much praised, the water bug skating on the surface of the pond comes
  down on the side of movement, zigzagging, as if writing a prescription in illegible script for the
  do-nothing blues. Maybe it has some task, or just prefers to be a moving target. Cheerier,
  either way, to be this bug who rarely stays still, than the dog, who spends most days stretching
  out asleep, motionless except for his rising and falling chest. Even the dog, however, will
  scramble up at the sound of the back door opening, alert to the possibility of escaping, hearing
  the opening notes of his route into the afternoon, nose down, sniffing at the cadences of the
  grass, and pausing to angle his heavy head and stare, curious for a moment, at the flash of
  movement on the pond.

  xxiii

  Tree of Life

  God is the fruit of a tree whose leaves we are. Rilke
  If we are the leaves, who is the branch or the root? Let God be the trunk of the tree, or the
  soil. We can be the leaves of an aspen, quaking, golden, on a crisp day late October in Chimayo
  or one of the other villages of northern New Mexico, where ristras of red chiles are hung from
  the blue lintels. But later in the near, no, after the leaves fall, decompose and vanish, we don’t
  want to be that. As for the fruit, it doesn’t last either. So why would God want to be the fruit?
  God can be the sap of the tree, or the sunshine, or even the moon on a cold northern night.
  God can be both sun and moon, taking back for Himself and Herself the ancient names of
  Artemis and Diana.

  xxiv

  Working From Home

  The workday seems further away than a far country. I don’t have any more desire, or the
  energy, to know its customs and language. And there’s enough work to be done at home in any
  case. I can spend the next eight hours worrying over life and death, since both are currently
  unprofitable. I will require office supplies. A desktop as flat as the future, for one thing. And
  then I can get busy not attending meetings. I can leave unopened the stacks of third-class mail,
  those solicitations that have a name resembling my own, ink-jetted on their envelopes. I will
  open the job of doing nothing, skip lunch, and then spend the rest of this afternoon’s portion of
  eternity climbing a ladder in a dream, half asleep in a queen-sized desert, and observing
  through half-shut eyes my co-workers descending and ascending.

  xxv

  Race

  Where are you running to with all the urgency of running away? Late, out of breath, are you
  running toward that day that is coming to meet you even faster than you are moving toward it?
  That’s the day you’ll find yourself truly out of breath, though perhaps no longer tired. Gasping,
  you will break through the tape at the finish line. That will be a very peculiar day, when you run
  out of time and the future passes right through you and recedes like an echo. And it will be
  clear to all concerned, not that many will be, that you have nowhere to run, and perhaps never
  did, along with the stones and the trees, and not unlike the ashes in your pipe, or the bark of
  your dog.

  xxvi

  Not A Suicide Note

  In a cab, on the way to an airport. A leaf outside the car window, a charming spring day,
  azaleas are blooming. If the plane goes down somewhere over the desert in New Mexico or
  Arizona, and if anyone manages to figure out your password, then these last few words will be
  your last words. Not a suicide note, exactly, but they might still have the gravity of a message
  from the dead. So perhaps you should take these seconds to say something along the lines of
  goodbye, I love you all, I leave with plenty left to do but nothing more to say.

  xxvii

  The Prayer of the Japanese Maple

  Moving slightly in a wind, the Japanese maple could be rocking in prayer. And if a prayer, it
  must be one of praise, rather than supplication, because what could it ask for? It sheds no
  sweat. What it needs from the soil, it finds underground. It bends toward the sunlight,
  though it was planted in the shadows of the oaks, officiating priests, their trunks dressed in
  robes of ivy that are draping the ground.

  xxviii

  Greetings

  The greetings of men are polite enough; they never quite touch each other. There’s room for
  all the howdy dos in the world, with space left over for the see you soons. Have a nice day
  requires even less comradery than what do you say. The exhortations to be well, to take care,
  and even to keep in touch are hardly robust enough to command anyone’s attention. How was
  your weekend the barber might ask. Or, more in the moment, how’s it going. Going to hell in a
  handbasket is not your reply. Your answer is fine. Not that there’s any need to answer his
  question. After all, whatever you might say has already been said. It’s what they all say. It’s
  enough to just turn the pages of your magazine without moving your head too much, and to
  see out of the corner of your eye the footrest of a Koken chair and the broom being pushed
  around it.

  xxix

  Loss

  Soon enough, but not soon enough, I will have passed through this. Once again, I am looking
  into the expressionless face of loss. What is it this time, the mouth seems to be asking. Same
  old same old is the reply. And the task is no different than last time. To get from here to there,
  to comfort myself by telling the same small child, the one who never grows up, not to worry,
  even though the way through has more shadow than path. If I look up through the branches of
  the pines, it could be noon, or two-thirty at the latest. Surely there’s enough sun left to make
  it, though not to make it back. That’s the way things are. Wherever it is I’m going, I will be
  staying there for a while.

  xxx

  Perspective

  Some days emptiness is as vast as the sky. Other days it’s only a room, with a lamp, a table, and
  a stack of books. Also, a brass key on the table, the one used to lift the steel plate that covers
  the water meter by the curb. This key has China stamped on it, a country you were told you
  could dig all the way to, when you were a child.

  xxxi

  Tiffany & Co.

  Twelve triangles pointing to the numbers one through twelve, each of them separated by four
  tick marks, with forty-eight of those in a circle; and, from the center, a thin pointer sweeping
  one tick at a time. What is it marking?

  Time is a riddle with an easy answer. The more of it you count, the less of it you have, and the
  final sum always adds to zero.

  xxxii

  One-way Trip

  Anousheh Ansari, one of the first female tourists in space, tells Oprah Winfrey that she would
  have given her life for that experience. “I always said that if they tell me it’s a one-way ticket, I
  would still take the trip.” So wonderful for her to have done it. She saw thirty-two sunrises
  and sunsets in a single day. Of course, every life is a one-way trip. Circling, orbiting. And she
  tells Oprah, “Space smells like a burnt cookie.”

  xxxiii

  Divorce

  My ex-wife made a catalog of what she wanted. It filled ten single-spaced typewritten pages. It
  was a like a souvenir of our souvenirs. Her desire was as translucent as the greenglass bowl
  from the antique market in Paris. “Listen to your wife,” the dealer had told me, when I balked
  at the price. There was fabric from one of the Russian republics, purchased at the folk art
  festival in Santa Fe, and a ceramic from Kyoto, rough, homespun, and contemporary, too, with
  its brushstroked portrait of a crane. She demanded the hats from China, a Muslim cap from
  Zanzibar, and bedskirts, towels, two chairs and an ottoman, a Tibetan rug, and the Porsche. A
  garlic press, a broom, a breadbasket – she wanted everything she listed, refusing to share, a
  refusal so fierce that I tried at first to pretend it was her way of holding on, rather than letting
  go.

  xxxiv

  Failed Marriage

  It was a trick, a stunt she performed like a girl standing on a pony, riding in circles. But the pony
  tired, and she lost her balance as she looked out over the fields through an opening in the
  striped circus tent pitched near a crossroads. Maybe the strong man turned her head. Or she
  had dreams of the city. Or I made the mistake, when I failed to applaud again and again. There
  was no high wire in my act, just plumes of chalk, a headlong rush, somersaults, a barrel, and
  some shadows. I cannot do without illusion, but I will do without her. I am unwilling to be
  duped any further, even if the duping has been a pleasure.

  xxxv

  Dodos

  The dodos found on Mauritius by Dutch sailors at the end of the 16th century were as big as
  swans. They had curled feathers on their round rumps. Walghvoghels, the Dutch called them,
  dodaersen – fat-asses, an animal with diamond eyes, melancholic, with a monk’s cowl for a
  head, and small wings. Repulsive, flightless birds who had no experience of humans on their
  island, which had emerged eight million years before in the Indian Ocean, they were not afraid.
  And so they allowed the Dutch sailors to beat them to death.

  xxxvi

  Hey, Joe

  Hey, Joe, where you going with that gun in your hand? Oh, I see now, it is not a gun, it is only
  an umbrella, one of those small, collapsible ones. And as for the notion of shooting your old
  lady, that’s gone, too, down south, as they say, way down Mexico way. Though, much like the
  missing are in where you going, it is hiding in plain sight.

  xxxvii

  Disasters

  First, you see what has happened and that it cannot be undone. That may take a year,
  sometimes two, and those are bad years. After that, nothing really changes, but you are
  better. You are all cried out. Or maybe all you are is tired. There is no particular day on which
  the upset ends. Instead, the dark becomes grey, the grey holds, the grey eventually light
  enough for you to make your way through it.

  xxxviii

  Old Seeds

  The five packets of old seeds are decades old. Most of them are for wildflowers, though you
  would never know it to look at them. Nothing blue in the bluebonnets, no sombrero on the
  Mexican Hat. Indian Blanket, lemon mint – the names are prettier than these dustpan specs on
  my palm, which look like something picked out of a dry nose, and not the bouquet that might
  have been picked and gathered to your chest after a season in the garden, had someone ever
  bothered to plant them.

  xxxix

  Family Life

  You would think, to see the photographs, that our lives were nothing but celebrations. All
  cakes and presents, the red, white and blue Fourths, the orange and black Halloweens. There
  are baked turkeys, yams steaming like breath, holidays year after year. Sunlit vacations, with
  the children happy to be seen with the parents. These are the days of not yet. No one has died
  yet. No one has remarried or divorced yet. Nobody has dropped out of school yet, or been
  picked up by the police at two in the morning. Not yet. Instead, there are the gifts at the end
  of the year, and the heavy meals, and the beautiful, unexpected snow, which is there in the
  yard for no reason other than be played in.

  xl

  Spring Shade

  Robert Fitzgerald translated the Odyssey and the Iliad. Nearer the end of his life, he translated
  the Aeneid as well. Spring Shade was the collection of his lyric poems, many of them
  translations as well, including a wonderful poem after Catullus. In a conversation that we had
  on a spring day in the shade of Massachusetts Avenue, at the end of my junior year, Robert
  Fitzgerald told me that anyone who had lived to the age of five had more than enough material
  to write about for the rest of his life. I think about that, as I look at an empty screen on my
  laptop, its corporate landscape of green hill and blue sky, its cotton clouds and tiny mountains,
  the mountains very distant, though they are no further than arm’s length away, and nothing
  comes to mind.

  xli

  Japanese Maples

  The leaves on the Japanese maples are shaking like fists. Hearing the wind, it makes sense that
  they would be angry. They have no ability to do anything about this cold weather or the
  inevitable disturbances of the wind, other than to hang on.

  xlii

  Fish

  There must be reasons I can find none of the fish in my pond. The water’s black and there’s
  algae. On the other hand, these are goldfish, and they are as bright as flames. Looking for
  them is like looking for the name of my eighth-grade teacher, or the street I lived on for three
  short months when I was twenty-one. It is like looking for the girlfriend from thirty years ago
  on Facebook and LinkedIn. It is like howI can no longer find in my dark, watery memory the
  price of the head of lettuce or of red Roma tomatoes that I was cutting in pieces for dinner
  earlier this evening.

  xliv

  Toward the End

  I overheard my parents talking when they were both in their nineties. They were in another
  room, but their dialog belonged in one of those films I might have seen in an art gallery, where
  nothing happens.
  Take your sweater off, Mom said.
  That’s what I’m trying to do.
  I think the sweater is too small for you.
  Oh boy, Dad said. It was unclear what he was responding to.
  I thought, there may be much to learn from the dying, but the lessons come in a class that
  requires prerequisites, none of which I have taken. Maybe dying is that dream I have heard
  about but never actually had, the one where you find yourself in a classroom although you are
  no longer in school. There is a test to be taken and you are unprepared. You do not have the
  number two pencil, the sheet with all the ovals, or even the slender blue book where your
  answers must be written.

  xlv

  Matchbooks Talking

  Mostly they are repeating with smoky voices the names of restaurants. Some of them, slurring,
  and those are the ones that reek of ash and late nights. Look at their embarrassed faces,
  stricken by the lives they have lived, though they may also claim to have been happy enough
  with their flame, for as long as it lasted.

  xlvi

  Hey Mister

  After meeting Mr. Tambourine Man, I found him difficult to follow, even though I recognized
  jingle jangle as the perfect description for that morning. I had never known anyone before
  whose first name was a musical instrument, although there may be girls named Viola outside
  the pages of literature. Truth be told, I have spent years trying to stop my bootheels from
  wandering. I prefer a place beneath the diamond sky where I can stay in place. I am happy
  enough beneath any sky, even the dirty one like today, with a few clouds, when it is drizzling,
  and my dog is nosing against the fences framing the rectangle of our backyard, and the St.
  Augustine grass is yellowed by winter. Hey, Mister, I sing out to the dog, trying to get his
  attention so we can go back inside. But he is old and does not hear very well, and he ignores
  my song.

  xlvii

  After The Funeral

  From my upstairs room with its glass walls, the branches of the trees are at eye level. There are
  the taller oaks that still have some of their leaves. Their copper leaves are the bitter color of
  hanging on, of clinging, though not to life, because these leaves are already dead. The sky has
  the look of another century, a turmoil of clouds and end-of-day pinks. It belongs in a heavy,
  gilded frame. Although I am not interested in immortality, people must be, to judge from the
  theme of the public remarks of the priest at the funeral I have just returned from. It was the
  husband who had died, two days before Christmas. I did not know him. I thought of him simply
  as someone ahead of me in line, as I sat in the pew, and then at home, waiting my turn.

  xlviii

  Song By The Sea

  In those days, the bitter waters were made sweet, and the bread of angels fell to the earth. But
  when the people, a mixed multitude who had marched together into the sea, broke into song,
  the greatest miracle was that they knew all the words, and even the tune, though this was a
  song not one of them had ever heard before.

  xlix

  Just Before Nightfall

  All intervals of time are illuminations.
  I am tired enough to do nothing, but it is difficult, being still.
  A blue heron is in transit, ascending from the creek bed.
  The squirrels are chattering, chasing each other.
  There is a kinship at this hour between things that were strangers before,
  and my thoughts are as sharp as a hundred blades of grass.

  l

  Faith

  Faith is the strength to turn waiting for something into looking for something. It sees the
  papery skin of the finite and feels beneath it for the bones of the infinite.

  Did I come up with that? Or did I just read it.

  li

  Stones Near the House

  The stacked stones of a wall separated one neighbor from another. There was a dusting of
  snow on the rock, and also a small brown bird, its head darting back and forth, the circle of its
  eye a black dot. Then, lifting off from the white ledge, the bird was gone. It left nothing behind
  but the tracks of its feet, three toes forward, one back, and those, only for a moment.

  lii

  Sunday School Grass

  I counted the breaths taken today in the field of breaths I have left. Each of them was as tender
  as a leaf of grass. This was the grass that withereth, cousin to the flower that fades and to the
  passing shadows. It was the grass I had heard about in Sunday school.

  lxiii

  Slovenian Poetry

  I am baffled by your writing, Tomaz Salmun. Charmed by it, too, but not enough to continue
  reading. To read three or four of your poems is the same as reading a thousand. So, when I sit
  in front of the real you in a Saturday workshop at the Writer’s Garret, I keep my thoughts to
  myself. Just as you have done in your poems. You have published, but you are not public. That
  must be your strategy, and it is not a bad one.

  liv

  Beer In Hand

  Before the wheel was invented, alcohol was brewed on a riverbank in China. So first came the
  ancient impulse to intoxication, and, only later, civilization. With a beer in my hand, my
  redwood deck can be my bamboo forest, and the green tile border of the swimming pool below
  will be the bank of my river. I can reinvent the wheel in my own stoned age.

  lv

  The Answer

  He had no answer. He filled in the ellipse nonetheless, blackening it as neatly as he could with a
  No. 2 pencil, as if none of the above was the same as I have no clue.

  lvi

  Umbrella

  Josiah burned the chariots of the sun. Birds in the branches of a yaupon holly ate the round red
  berries. I lost my favorite umbrella, the one I brought all the way home from Madeline Gely on
  Rue St. Germaine. Left it in a restaurant in Dallas, most likely.

  Nothing is true except what has already happened, and not even all of that.

  lvii

  Sleepy

  Today has been put to bed. The events of the day have a tousled, mixed-up air, like pictures
  half-seen through narrowed, nearly closed eyes. Was that a banana that was sliced in the
  morning? Was the front door locked, the dog looking out the window as I drove away? And
  what is there to say about the paper cup with the green mermaid, other than there is not
  enough caffeine in all the coffee in Costa Rica to clear or forestall the fog settling on my
  shoulders.

  lviii

  Yesterday’s News

  Yesterday in the news: Bengal tigers, bears, a grey wolf, lions and a monkey escaped in the last
  hour before nightfall, from a shelter in Zanesville, Ohio. The cage doors had been left open by a
  suicidal keeper, who then killed himself. As for the loosed animals, all were shot to death by
  the local police.

  All except for the monkey, which had been eaten earlier that evening.

  lix

  Old MacDonald

  Tickets to Nabucco and a copy of Einstein’s Ideas and Opinions. The Verdi opera and the
  hardbound book. Both are on a tabletop in my study. Both stay where they are after I turn out
  the lights and go tuck myself in. What possible relationship could there be between these two
  and farm animals?

  Only the eI, ei, in Einstein, and the concluding o of Nabucco.

  lx

  Divorcing

  She insists that the silver-footed bowl she found in the flea market north of Paris on our
  honeymoon is hers, rather than ours. Likewise the car, though my name is on the title
  alongside hers – above it in fact – and the woven hats from a narrow street in Beijing, or was it
  Shanghai, and the wooden prayer house from Bangkok, and even the opium bed from
  Indonesia, which we found at The Barking Frog, a local store on Cedar Springs Road, where we
  also bought the massive carved teak chair no one ever sat in. The Lucite art candles from
  Stanley Korshak—true, they were a gift, bought for her one at a time over five years of
  giftgiving. But the rug from Packards in Santa Fe, which was on the shop’s wall, a block south
  from the Plaza? It was bought on my birthday, on a trip that was one of her gifts to me. I was
  her prince once upon a time. But now I am a frog, and a barking frog at that.

  lxi

  Disillusionment

  Did it happen when you pointed your finger to the clouds but kept both feet on the ground? Or
  that moment when you failed to sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment, giving up on
  visionaries and mystics? It happened, however it happened. And now your future and your
  understanding of it are like an apple you have bitten, breaking its skin. With that bite, you have
  tasted everything to come, which has the taste of everything you have lost.

  lxii

  Opposites

  The assignment was to write a sentence so true even its opposite is true. I wrote, life’s a
  mystery, breath miraculous, and death an illusion.

  lxiii

  Brugmansia

  The brugmansia flower is also called angel’s trumpet, though what an angel needs a trumpet
  for, I am not sure. Perhaps to proclaim both the truth and its opposite, that life can be
  renewed in every moment, and the past is the same as destiny and cannot be escaped.

  Or that surely the Eternal is in this place and I did not know it. Or that the only whole heart is a
  broken heart.

  This last wisdom is a comfort, a suggestion of redemption.

  lxiv

  Cedar Waxwings

  Such sleek grey birds. They wear black masks like bandits and raid for their berries, but the
  yellow bellies and the bright yellow on their tails give them away, as do the tips of their wings,
  dipped in red. Was it the wind that blew four of them downward to their deaths earlier this
  morning? Or did the one fly into the pane of glass in my kitchen, and then the other three
  follow? However it happened, or why, there are four cedar waxwings dead on my cedar deck,
  leaving me to do the finding and the discarding that someday may be done for me.

  lxv

  Meandering

  Hard to know where this going, this sauntering paragraph after paragraph, to use a word
  unheard in conversation, as rare as hearing ping unyoked to pong, or seeing someone make a
  beeline to a phone booth these days, or to a news stand.

  lxvi

  Old Dog

  You must be sleeping and in another room. Even if you were awake, you are no longer able to
  see the passing car, much less bark at it, or hear whether I have just come home. You pay no
  attention to the front door closing. That is your old age. But then I have never known what you
  are mindful of. And you have never lived a life unloved, however poorly that love, being
  human, may have been expressed.

  lxvii

  Something I Read Once

  Someone is at the door for whom you have not prepared, and your breath gasps either in joy or
  in fear. If you have set no table for joy, then it will be fear. But let joy recline across from you,
  and life is a feast.

  lxviii

  Unrequited

  I will love you with the weight of an unwanted love. I will carry it all my days, lightly and not.
  And then at the end I will give it away, this thing I own completely.

  lxix

  Emily

  In the Morgan Library and Museum there was a lock of Emily Dickenson’s hair. Red in part,
  brown in part, a reddish brown curve, nearly a circle, but open. So, why a lock? What does this
  lock protect or keep us out of? She needed no lock to keep the strands of her memories to
  herself, this Emily Elizabeth Dickenson who is somebody now, public and publicized by the
  Morgan, however dreary she might think that is.

  lxx

  Central Park

  I walked here forty years ago, across from the Plaza. And I am happier now then I was then,
  despite deaths and other dissolutions. Maybe happier than I have ever been. Or, less
  unhappy, at least, which comes to the same thing. Look at all these walkers and runners in
  their twenties! They have their decades of life ahead of them. My strides have already been
  taken. They look uneasy, while I am as easy in this place as the statues on the southern edge of
  the park. Just as years ago, I do not know why any of us belong here — not me, not them, not
  San Martin, Argentina’s liberator, or William Tecumseh Sherman, on horseback and in gold, and
  I no longer need to know.

  lxxi

  Thoughts for a Last Day

  Whatever was left to do will be undone. What I thought I wanted to do, I will come no closer to
  doing. The shallows of my breath are reaching the shore. My life is withdrawing, back to the
  ocean it came from. The waves are restless on top; but below, a cold and a stillness, and a
  depth that is unfathomable.

  lxxii

  Not the News

  A neighbor is cutting his lawn on Sunday morning. A heavy snowfall of white flowers from the
  crepe myrtles is predicted. On the opinion pages, someone says that the folk music that passes
  for prayer at The Hills Baptist Church should be left to the folk, though there will be letters on
  both sides of this issue. In the Food section, coffee and pancakes. If eggs, medium well, and
  add cheese if scrambling; if bacon, crisp; either toast or English muffins, but always extra
  butter.

  lxxiii

  City Life

  The yucca and the palm in their pots near the swimming pool are dreaming of the desert this
  summer. The lawn has given up. It knows it can only grow so tall.

  lxxiv

  Adam’s Diary

  First the grey in the skies. Then the wind rising and flowing over the raised arms of two trees.
  A few drops fall. Soon enough, a drumming rhythm. Then evening, and the closing of the
  gates of the day.

  Morning again, and we are dozing in the garden. My arm is encircling Eve’s waist. It is a
  paradise here, wet, mossy, in the shade of the tree of knowledge. Let us leave the unpicked
  fruit on the branch to ripen and rot.

  lxxv

  Oleanders, Eucalyptus, Sand

  Oleanders divide northbound from southbound on the freeways in Southern California. The
  bark on the eucalyptus to the east and the west is peeling. The leaves are as slender as fingers,
  and the air exhales the odor of salt water. I park at the beach in Oceanside. The waves are
  rising, up to an edge, and a yellow-legged gull, a red spot on its beak, is running across the sand.
  This warm sand feels exactly as it always did on my bare feet, no different than it had decades
  before, and at this moment I think, happiness is still available, but only as much of it as I am
  willing to accept, and not a grain more.

  lxxvi

  What Wisdom

  Feel no difference between gain and loss, good news and bad news – that is one of the
  wisdoms, and maybe the primary one, if the goal is either serenity or indifference, states that
  might be associated with Buddhism, though they could as easily be represented by a cat.

  lxxvii

  Daughter

  I have read of poets who were also fathers and left behind words of guidance for their
  daughters. What they wrote were amulets of protection against the cruelties of the world.
  Their lines of praise speak of how their gracious daughters will beguile the world but also
  attract its dangers. My case is not like that. My daughter has found her way by leaving me
  behind. I subsist in the unhappy past of her imagination. She has escaped the prison of her
  childhood, where I remain a jailer. Like a fever, this story she tells herself keeps her warm. In
  my version, no father is an island, though some of us must live on one, and no matter how
  thirsty I might be, I know the sea around me is salt and not to drink.

  lxxviii

  When My Mother Died

  My mother was not much of a caretaker, but she did take care of herself and left little for me to
  do. She loved her own mother, her sisters and her brother dearly. Her children mattered,
  though not as much; her grandchildren, less. She cared nothing at all for dogs or cats. Yes, she
  could be giving, though mostly she gave orders. In the years of her dying, we had more in
  common than we ever did, and I grew closer to her again. Perhaps it was because I was
  marching to the place she held for me in her heart, and we enjoyed the deeper bond of our
  shared opinion; both of us were disappointed in me.

  lxxix

  Mother

  What more can I say about my mother? That her life seemed as though it would go on, and
  then it seemed to end for no reason, though not against her wishes. She took her pills and did
  her exercises, and asked out loud why she had been given another day. In the time before
  memory, she was my world. Then she became the world I fled from, leaving through the door
  she had left open for me. It was not my portion to understand her. Our time together was
  intermittent; a weekend, short visits. What her death did is what any death does. It places a
  question in my head that finds lodging at night in my heart – a question of what is more
  believable, the yeti, the unicorn, or that my mother is gone.

  lxxx

  Fatherhood

  Fatherhood was an awkward fit for me. Two children, many troubles. I stumbled, and still do.
  What I gave my daughter, she threw away. There will be no returns on that deposit. My son is
  a different story. I can feel the mystery of our love, but cannot alter what it is made of, sadness
  and worry. He will be my mourner when I die. For my daughter, my death will just be news. If
  she even hears about it. And she should refuse to grieve. Her grief will not be necessary. I
  have done enough already in her name.

  lxxxi

  Evaluation

  As I get older it becomes clearer how unexceptional I am.
  I married for richer or poorer.
  I will be dying sooner or later.
  I have used the same thirty or so words to repeat myself, and have nothing much to say. If
  there is no distinction in these words, that is a defect of their birth. Midnight was their mother,
  and the father is unknown.

  lxxxii

  My Grandfather Was A Tailor

  With a sharp needle and miles of thread I learned to sew a brown button of earth on the blue
  shirt of the lake. This was only one of my many miracles of fashion. The trees strutted on a
  spring runway. Their leaves in summer were like leather, their branches wearing bracelets of
  small red berries. Then came peacock fall, then minimal winter, day after day and season after
  season. Only the nights were all the same: Hounds baying at the darkness, its cloak falling
  almost to my ankles. Critics!

  lxxxiii

  Returning Home

  The soul returns home when life ends. But this trip is not like any I am used to.
  It is not like flying home from San Diego back to Dallas.
  No one announces through the intercom that the soul is beginning its ascent.
  No carry-on items to be sure are safely stowed, no tray table that must be put back in its full
  upright position.
  When I fly home, the lower the plane goes the clearer it all becomes, the less abstract. At first,
  I can see a grid of lights below. Then what was only geometry from far above turns into a
  house or a warehouse. What was only a movement is a moving van, or a line of cars on a
  roadway. It is not like that when the soul returns home. Everything that was specific becomes
  less so. What was definite becomes indefinite. What was recognizable, unrecognized.

  lxxxiv

  Cemetery Visit

  The ground is whiskered with stubble at Eternal Hills. Tracing a corkscrew path, a pair of
  squirrels chase each other around a tree trunk, leaping from the trunk to a branch, and from
  one bending branch to another. The wasps retreat to their corners. The level markers are grey
  stepping stones on the mown lawn where both of my parents are buried. Blind to the dated
  born and died, the beloved and forever in our memory, the flowers and the flags, two blue jays
  enjoy their bird’s eye view of the surroundings. Only the clouds have a way of saying what
  cannot be said.

  lxxxv

  Souvenirs

  Good thing that there are tables, so that keepsakes – the lock of hair, a letter opener – have a
  place to be kept. Even better that there are doors, so that most things – clouds, fish, a billboard
  – can be kept outside.

  I am surrounded by souvenirs. I am advised to let go but cannot. I think the truest kind of love
  is unrequited love, and all love is unrequited sooner or later

  lxxxvi

  Rose Bush

  The rose bush has died in its container. It drapes over the sides, its thin, stiff brown arms
  reaching forward. No blooms. It is still full of thorns though, and they are as sharp as ever they
  were when it was alive.

  lxxxvii

  Ugly Baby

  I was never a beautiful baby, I was an ugly one. That is what my father told me, and my mother
  had no comment. She had other reasons for disapproval. Or perhaps it was only
  disappointment, and nothing I should take personally. She was a reader, and I was a writer who
  never wrote to her. I made money, and she took no pleasure in spending. If I was her mirror,
  what could I have been to my father? A book he had half written but never read. My father
  had his virtues. I admired the modesty of his desires, the veils of his silences, and the room he
  left for others. Also, his humor. You want an example? My former brother-in-law Terry
  continued to come visiting my parents years after the marriage to my sister had ended. One
  time, when I was there, my father turned in Terry’s direction, and then asked me, “How do you
  say adios in Spanish?”

  lxxxviii

  The Story of Life

  Some say it began in violence, and in the vent of a deep sea spring. Others believe it started on
  the flank of a volcano, with a molten spark. As likely it was begot in the dark of a warm pond.
  And then it evolved. Centuries passed, millennia, eons. A billion years were not nearly long
  enough. More time passes. And at last, history begins. And now we are passing in our
  generations, born and dying, our parades, and all those fading notes of our horns and their
  echoes.

  lxxxix

  My Parents’ House

  Eucalyptus, the mourning dove and a morning rose in the garden, the side patios of the house,
  the cloudless sky overhead – these are the things that stay behind, after my parents have gone.
  The deep blue sky, and, closer to the horizon, the hazier and lighter blue. The red tile roofs and
  white stucco walls. I am a visitor here, and an inheritor as well. I have nowhere else to come
  home to, and this is not home. I belong here, though not as much as do the palms, and the
  hibiscus, the peeling eucalyptus, the salt air and the hummingbirds in it.

  xc

  The House in Dallas

  I was never at home here either.
  No echoes of childhood in this house.
  It is a cup empty of memories.
  I can hear the unseen birds in the red oak trees.
  The oak leaves are like tongues as the wind sings through them.
  The bird answers a message that only it understands.

  xci

  Breath

  We say “our death,” but do any of us experience our own deaths? We are gone the moment
  before the moment death arrives. We do not know if that breath, our very last one, was a gasp
  or only a sigh. We have already left. Our last breath is on its own.

  xcii

  Reading Li Po

  In the colorless flow of unknown Chinese script, I am stepping on a yellow moon reflected in a
  mountain stream.

  xciii

  Collection

  The collectors are destroyers, emptying what is valuable by assigning it monetary value. Only
  the husk of the thing is left, the hard, shiny shell. The soft flesh inside has disappeared, and the
  spirit with it.

  xciv

  Voice

  When I have no word for red, I can not tell an apple from a rose.
  Wine is more confusing than intoxicating.
  And without blue, there is no sky.
  When I walk through the splitting of the sea, I can not rejoice on the other side.
  I am tired of reading what has already been written.
  Instead, I want to speak out, my voice, page after page, until, hundreds of pages later, I can
  hear myself.

  xcv

  Suggestion

  After years of the same, my life has revealed itself. It is a game that cannot be won.
  I exercised, dieted, kept faith, studied the wisdom of the ages, and engaged with miracles and r
  mirages.

  And I have arrived at acceptance.
  I accept the simple suggestion to keep a noise-cancelling headset on.

  xcvi

  Natural Religion

  In the repetitive speech of the birds, there is the watchword of a faith.
  The creek after a rainfall repeats it.
  The rushing water is in no hurry, it is going nowhere it has not gone before.
  The breeze in its easy exhalation is the breath.
  And in the silence of a faraway star is a command to listen.

  xcvii

  Aspens

  The aspen leaves are trembling. This is the life they have, waiting for a wind that comes down
  like the law, descending the mountain out of a blue autumn sky, scattering their gold.

  xcviii

  Live Oaks

  The afternoon is a cliff, with no place for a foothold. It has been snowing. And when the
  ground freezes, even the robins are wild animals. The live oaks rise out of the frost. Their bark
  is a rough hide. I share roots with these live oaks. We might be family, both of us created from
  dust. At the end of days, there may be no difference between us. I will see everything then,
  which will be the same as seeing nothing.

  xcix

  Proust & Progress

  Reading him, or trying to, and thinking, there are cameras for this, how pointless to describe in
  such detail what can be seen in a snapshot.

  Nowadays only the invisible requires description, and cameras for the invisible may be coming
  soon.

  c

  Fat

  He has mastered the art of doing nothing and has grown his body into a Buddha. As if his fat
  were wisdom, and his inability to move a spiritual state. His laziness has become his
  communion with nothingness. The energy he spends pays only for his breathing. Inhales of
  botanicals are keeping him high, however low he is to the ground. He is a mysterious man.
  Where did the boy in him go? Did that boy disappear under the layers? When he was unable
  to keep up, did he make a decision to stay down? I am trying to see him. I am straining to hear
  his voice, or the echo of it, from whatever canyon he fell into.

  ci

  Father and Son

  The times we went together, we were furthest apart.
  Going away, we never got away from the disappointments of fathers and sons.
  You would have none of my morning coffee.
  You remain in the hotel room, sleeping late and biding your time.
  English muffins are in the toaster. There is butter, there is honey.
  It has been decades since I carried you in my arms, or took you by the hand. But you are not
  that boy, and I am not that man.
  I am the one who will be in the ground, and you are the one with the shovel, or the handful of
  dirt, tossing it down on me, in a ceremony, if there is one, if you want one.

  cii

  Mission Accomplished

  The search for the miraculous is over. To find it, all I have to do is breathe; and then, out of
  breath, return to eternity.

  ciii

  Scraps

  What I find on scraps of paper hiding under the covers and between the pages of the book
  titled What Happens After I Die: A blank postcard, notices of the new restaurants that opened
  three years ago, a seed packet from a gift shop in another country, the page from the
  prescription pad of a retired doctor, ideas for travel, names of hotels, guides to Glacier Bay,
  Vermijo Park Ranch, and the Channel Islands, and lists of other books that include, among the
  many titles, It’s Never Too Late To Begin Again.

  civ

  Senescence

  I am winding down, like a season. I am looking for the good in good night. Once I was
  valedictorian. Now farewells are my speech. I am in a state of forgetting. First the pages and
  pages I have read, in the thousands of books on my shelves. And then, what I have done, in the
  tens of thousands of hours. As for these books, some of their pages have never been turned,
  though they were shelved with good intentions. My unreadable life, however, has been lived.
  Boyhood, career, two marriages. I had children and was a child myself. If only I could recall
  more from those unwritten days.

  cv

  Permanence

  Even the brass monument will take its place some Saturday afternoon on the card table at the
  garage sale.

  cvi

  Ancient Noises

  The rivers clap their hands, the trees in the forest rejoice, the mountains sing. Or so the
  psalmist says. It must have been a noisy world in the time of King David. Harder to find peace
  and quiet, even if you went away for the weekend to your place in the country, to your lake or
  your cave. In those days, someone was always sowing the wind and then reaping the
  whirlwind. Of course, we have noises of our own. There is the construction of my new
  neighbor’s dream home across the street. That work proceeds, following a month of noisy
  demolition. Hammering, sawing. The Linehan’s dream home was destroyed, the one built in
  1951, the year of my birth, and vacant and silent since Mrs. Linehan’s death.

  cvii

  Descriptions

  My poems are only word games, composed by counting syllables, or untuned off rhymes.
  I could no more describe a forest than a shirt, though I can see the threads and the branches,
  the thing to wear and the somewhere. And I can tell you each has the letters r and t. Same
  with my hours. My mornings are untitled, only an exclamation gets me on my feet. Noonday
  might be my yellow pad. My parenthetical evenings are long asides, punctuated at last by
  sleep.

  cviii

  A Poet Speaks to Her Reader

  Wislawa Symborska, I do not speak your language. Nonetheless I am reading a paperback of
  your work, collected and new, on the train from Krakow to Warsaw. And you are telling me to
  look out the window. Maybe you want me to see how well-groomed the countryside is, how
  the wildflowers are in place, how the homes line up behind their fences. You might be pointing
  out the sheltering wings of clouds in the sky. Are you rebuking me, because I am missing
  everything while reading? Look up from the page, you shout, though shouting is not really
  your style. Keep an eye on this world, you whisper. You want to make sure I realize, which I
  already do, that the stars are there, even if they are invisible in the light of day.

  cix

  Encouragement

  I do not remember why I ever bothered to print out the two pages of “Winter-Lull” by D.H.
  Lawrence. The poem appeared years ago in my inbox, from Poets.org, part of its Poem-a-Day
  service that I subscribed to back then. And here it still is, years later, inserted between two
  pages in my favorite Wislawa Symborska paperback. Maybe it was saved for the brief bio that
  appears below the text of the poem, which lets me know that Lawrence died young. Or for the
  small photo of the poet that accompanies the bio, which seems to have been taken at a pier.
  Lawrence’s eyes are looking away, gazing at a boat, if that is what the blurred object was.
  Reading “Winter-Lull” again, with its overheated diction, daunted and nullity and verity, it is
  possible that I saved it as encouragement, a “your work is at least this good” message, which is
  what I am taking from it now, as I tear up the unfolded pages and leave them in the
  wastebasket.

  cx

  Meditation

  The habit of making comparisons is a bad habit. Better to focus on the present moment and to
  be content with it. Sounds simple enough. No need to dress in a saffron-colored robe or sit
  cross-legged while listening to the inner voice in order to learn this lesson. Though, in my
  experience, the trouble with focusing on the present moment begins the moment you stop
  doing so, and that moment is inevitable.

  cxi

  Oh Henry

  The life he wanted to lead was the exceptional life. The subjects he chose to write about were
  the unexpected ones. And when asked where in the wider world he had ever gone, Henry
  David Thoreau answered that he had traveled far in Concord.

  cxii

  Alone

  Whether or not mankind is alone in the universe, who knows. Even if true, it is also false. To
  say a man writing at a desk in his house is alone, that is a true answer, but it insults the dog on
  the rug nearby.

  cxiii

  Dolores Is Visited By A Doctor Before Her Surgery

  The doctor was still wearing his suede jacket when he dropped by to check on you. That was Dr.
  Barton, who had returned from his weekend in Aspen. You were on a metal trolley being
  wheeled off to an operating room. And that nurse who was so wonderful, we cannot
  remember her name.

  cxiv

  Math Homework

  I worked with my son tonight on his algebra. He called me back to his room for help with
  question after question. He failed to multiply each side by the same number. He made
  thoughtless errors. I did not want to help. I called him lazy and said he was wasting my time
  and shortening my life. I said, “Don’t ask me another question!” He did not come upstairs
  again. So I went down after a while to see how he was doing. He announced that he had
  reading to do. “Go on, get ready for bed,” I told him. “I’ll read to you.” So I read him from the
  required chapter of To Kill A Mockingbird. He sat in his chair. I lay on his bed reading. There
  were no unknowns to solve for. There was nothing to add or subtract.

  cxv

  Snow Goose

  There is a snow goose in the air. I can hear the clapping of the branches of a walnut tree. A
  yellow butterfly bounces off the geraniums. We are sharing our lives. Every particle of the air
  is clear, but they are blue together.

  cxvi

  In Switzerland with Pam

  We took a side trip to Poschiavo. It was empty on a Sunday in January. Where’s everybody?
  You took photographs of the town – empty streets, ironwork, colored shutters, molding on
  doors, a stony church, a single spire. Then we forgot the camera on the train. Wonder where
  those pictures are now? Back, we walked down the Bahnhofstrasse, just looking for things to
  buy. We found Cuban cigars and a gold lighter. We bought linens for gifts. You bought a Sud
  See pearl, from Tahiti.
  You said, “A pearl’s a living thing.”
  “It’s far from home,” I said.
  It snowed very day in Zurich, storybook flakes, more beautiful than any pearl.

  cxvii

  Flight

  Screaming in its throat, this plane is coming down no matter what. There can be no other end
  to any flight. Only the speed makes them different, a crash or a descent.

  cxviii

  The Dow

  The market fell today, plummeted like a suicide diving head first from the Bay Bridge. Down,
  down, down. No water down there though, no bottom to fall to, no waterdark surface to
  break. Just falling, and everyone talking about it. All that money lost. It was beautiful for a
  while though, before the fall, looking out to the city under the bright cables and towers, seeing
  the strange orange paint as brilliant as a sunset.

  cxix

  The Everyday

  Bed, sink, mirror, refrigerator, toilet, sink. Car, driveway, street, houses, lawns, mailboxes. You
  see the same thing every day, or you don’t see it, same thing.

  cxx

  Talmud Study

  The Talmud asks, when do we say our prayers? In the evening, and in the morning. Evening
  first, as it is written:
  There was evening, and there was morning, a first day.
  And how do we know when it is evening? When the stars come out.
  But the stars are always out. Even when you cannot see them, that does not mean they are not
  there.

  cxxi

  Brazil

  Let’s go! Maybe to Brazil – on the spur of the moment, as if moments spurred us on, and not
  boredom, or the discounted price of airfares and hotels. We daydreamed of a trip to Rio, to
  Iguazu Falls, to the Amazon. We knew a couple from Sao Paulo years ago. Their children were
  in pre-school with ours. I can remember the wife, Renata, in her orange swimsuit around my
  pool. I cannot remember the husband’s name. He was a physician, boyish, here doing cancer
  research in the States. In Sao Paulo he worked in his father-in-law’s clinic, and he told me
  about medical treatment in Brazil. He said you saw things in Sao Paolo you would never see
  here, how villagers would come down from the mountains, when they were in pain. That trip
  from their village into the city was difficult for them. They lost their work, they were afraid – of
  the expense, of the city, of the bad news. So people waited a long time in the village and only
  came down to the clinic when their fear was as enormous as the tumor that even the most
  fearful could no longer ignore. Only then would they say, Let’s go!

  cxxii

  Watching A Crow Fly

  As the crow flies, that is how you judge distance? As if anything living ever traveled a straight
  line. You might as well make music as the crow sings, cawing to that mythical crow who makes
  a beeline, while the bee buzzes on its own unpredictable path, jumpy and turbulent.

  cxxiii

  Another Story the Typist Told Me

  The quick brown fox asked what the lazy dog was doing in the middle of the street, its poodle
  body in a puddle over a yellow stripe on the asphalt. Was this laziness? Could the lazy dog no
  longer be bothered to move out of harm’s way? It just lay there, seemingly without that spark
  of self-preservation that even the youngest poodles possess. How was it possible? Fear of
  humans is a truth that has been barked and growled for generations, it is a saying that is also
  the subject of birdsong. Even cockroaches know it. It could also be heard in the buzz of flies,
  the twenty-six that were buzzing over the body of the lazy dog, forming and reforming the
  syntax of an answer to the quick brown fox, the quick inspecting the dead.

  cxxiv

  After Du Fu

  The blue herons are in transit, and squirrels are chattering. A duck flies through the creek bed,
  riding the disappearing light of the day. There is a kinship at this hour between beings that
  were strangers before.

  There are three kinds of twilight, and all intervals of time are illuminations. Before nightfall, my
  thoughts are as sharp as a hundred blades of grass.

  cxxv

  Loss

  What do we owe the dead? Why are we speaking to their ashes? We can talk to them or
  about them only so much, before nothing in life has more presence than their absence. We
  come to the cemetery and to the headstone, and we come to no conclusions and make no
  headway. We do this talking to ourselves. We consider the ends of things, and the one
  certainty, that loss always wins.

  cxxvi

  Cleaning Up

  The hungry mouth of the dustpan, the straw-footed broom, the whirring dishwasher, the
  sheets and towels in a rumbling drier.

  Even better, cleaning up, my neck bent in the shower as if it were on the block, the falling water
  severing me from the past and the present moment, a clean dry towel hanging down from the
  silver hook like the fruit of a forbidden tree.

  cxxvii

  Visiting Hours

  Among the things I can only do so much of when I visit my mother in California is watching
  public television on Sunday night. Earlier, we will have been walking through the
  neighborhoods of her retirement community, neighborhoods that are named after Greek
  villages, where all the homes have white stucco walls and terracotta-colored roofs. During the
  PBS station breaks, my mother will tell me that she is ninety-five, is tired with living, and is
  “ready to go.” Also, she tells me, I simply do not understand that life is something you can only
  do so much of.

  cxxviii

  In George Oppen’s Apartment

  Had it been water, George Oppen wrote in one of his poems, delighting in his choice of the
  tense of the language. For him, words were as real as the objects, maybe even more real than
  the car, the lake, and the stars he mentioned in later lines. I visited with George and his wife,
  Mary, in their apartment in San Francisco. We sat together at their kitchen table. Mari, their
  niece, took to meet her uncle. The George Oppen? I asked her, after I met her by accident on
  the campus of UC Berkeley. The objectivist poet, the peer of Ezra Pound’s. That might have
  been in 1972, had it not been 1973.

  cxxix

  Proof No Proof

  There are no proofs outside the classroom. But there is plenty of enthusiasm, and it will find its
  own reasons. Love, too, will naysay the blues. It will find reasons for joy, whether it can be
  proved or not.

  cxxx

  Thinking Out Loud

  I walked across the earth but left no footprints.
  The ground was too hard.
  My achievements are like the trophies encased in an empty hallway.
  I wandered, as a sheep might, herded to a grave.
  And what did I plant on God’s green earth?
  Blessed be the true judge.

  cxxxi

  Cedar Waxwings Again

  They are crashing into my windows by the dozens, on their way through. I have no explanation
  for their urgency, though there surely must be one.

  Some survive the crash, others fall, stunned, damaged, but still breathing and hiding their
  surprise.

  This selection is natural. It is in nature, determining who shall live and who shall die, none by
  stoning, none by strangling, but, for cedar waxwings, some by smacking into the glass of a
  kitchen or a bedroom window.

  cxxxii

  Fleeting

  The seal has been broken. That which is contained is already going bad. I can see it, there —
  the grey mold and the discoloration. And nothing can save it.
  You have only the time that is fleeting.
  So you need to take it, even if you do not want it.

• Poems Found & Unfinished

  i

  Starting With Catullus

  She told me don’t listen to the talk.
  She wanted nobody else, no matter what they’d offer.
  But what she told me turned into chalk
  written in wind and on water.

  ii

  Horace III, 15, Uxor pauperis Ibyci

  Wife of penniless Ibycus,
  set a limit to your sinful self at last
  and your infamous exertions.
  Burial is whispering to you.

  Stop fluttering like a debutante,
  spreading out your damp mist over the shining stars.
  What can do well for Chloe
  won’t, Chloris, for you.

  Let your daughter lay siege to the houses of young men.
  She’s still a Bacchant, her heart throbs like a beating drum.
  Love for some boy pushes her on,
  warm as a forest doe.

  Knitting yarn is the thing for you, fleeced near Luceria,
  not the plucking of lutes.
  Not the bloom of the purple rose
  or the bottle of red wine drained deep
  for little old you.

  iii

  After Horace – The Meal

  You will eat well, friend, at my house,
  if you bring the meal,
  and you bring a lovely girl with you,
  and laughter.

  If you bring these, you will eat well.
  In return, I will offer you my company.
  My wallet only has cobwebs in it.
  But together we can ease the pains of life
  with the pleasure of the warmth of our minds
  and the affirming love of friends.

  iii

  Mt. Palomar’s Eye

  Its bell-like housing mounts above the Pacific.
  Time’s image gathers on its curving dish.

  Mysterious and scientific,
  Its eye refracts light warm as a wish.

  Translator of the sky,
  of the interstellar, the tracks

  of super novae, the helical grace
  of galaxies, stars in packs,

  the white dwarf in black-bodied space,
  its sleepless eye

  writes epitaphs for a cold dark place.

  iv

  Snake Song

  Curled in slimy grots,
  Or sossed in favorite spots
  Of belly-smooth marsh grass
  and cool morass,
  They shed and slither.
  Springtime is snake weather.

  v

  True Love

  Stranded on one shore
  day and night,
  the web is unspun.
  Love, love, love –
  it’s a froth,
  like the white cap of the surf,
  like the boat boarded by so many
  that never reaches land.

  vi

  Boy With Dog

  Even when you sit
  for your treat or food,
  your rump and tail exhibit
  dangerous joys,
  more beastlike than the boy’s.
  He has no ancestral wood,
  but you, as you fall to sleep,
  you circle down to rest
  like a wolf, entering a forest
  where you hunt to earn your keep.
  He thinks you’re only snoozing
  and strokes the fur ring
  of your back to wake you up,
  his hand a sudden treat,
  too slow to block your bite,
  or break your grip.
  Later, and shyer,
  you trot off with a bone
  to the rug and circle down,
  again as soft as fur.

  vii

  Question

  Begin with a bare whisper,
  upward, to the sky.
  The stars burn like a furor
  difficult to believe.
  What am I?
  And why alive?

  viii

  Aging

  You ask, and does the mind
  grow old, among
  simplicities? I think
  it does. The young
  have a bewildering freedom.
  Wintergreen,
  I learn to look upon
  another scene.

  ix

  Street Fight

  And in this corner,
  words on a theatre marquee,
  and the rhythm of slogans
  at the grocery store.
  Oranges, from California!
  Saved by the bell!
  To Have and Have Not,
  Lauren Bacall.

  x

  At The Ocean in 1966

  It was the undertow
  tugging at my feet on Dewey Beach,
  California behind me,
  and in front just the horizon,
  and the water
  pulling me forward.
  I thought it was nothing,
  it was not nothing.

  xi

  Adoption, 1984

  You will be sixteen in the year 2000.
  Millenia happen
  once in a thousand years.
  but a boy like you
  will never happen again.

  You were meant to be
  a begotten son,
  but my wife was too old for that,
  so we became your finders
  and your keepers.

  xii

  Envoi, June 1988

  Go, little book,
  modest voice
  speaking in measure.

  Reader, accept this gift.
  this toy, batteries not included.
  You must make it go.

  xiii

  Uncouplet After Argument

  Why are we still together?
  For how much longer?

  xiv

  Memory

  If memory can will one thing,
  let this be the one:
  to make a song
  of our lives, the random,
  the real, the daily fuss
  that matters only to us.

  Raking leaves in the fall,
  when the wind is picking up
  scattering the pile,

  and a daughter jumped on the leaves.
  It’s a game, she believes.
  Stop kicking the pile, stop!

  I recall how a son
  would always say bememberl
  or she would ask, never
  never, never, do you mean
  never? I can hear them both laugh.
  No need for the photograph.

  It is cold, time to go in.
  Time to be saying goodbyes.
  I hear the wind sing,
  the one that scatters families.
  Farewell, children.
  I hear the wind rising.

  xv

  Checking On The Sleeping Child

  Your breathing is uneasy.
  Your ship of sleep breaks into
  pieces, a sleepwreck.
  I can listen but not see
  a good way to comfort you,
  the room is too dark.

  Is your face against the walls?
  Are they blocking your breathing?
  You face obstacles.
  I have problems of my own.
  I can hear trains approaching
  crossings, backfires on

  the block, even the thin song
  hummed by the filament in
  the lamp’s bright bulb on my desk.
  This whole house is echoing.
  My footfalls have come back down
  stairs, but not to rest.

  xvi

  Advice

  What do you want to do,
  and what are you waiting for?
  Move it!
  Move out of the way before
  it falls on you.

  xvii

  My Father Gave Me His Old Watch

  My father’s watch was off as soon as I put it on.
  Can a watch answer a question? Can it tell how long it has been?

  The day divides into hours, the year into seasons
  Lifetimes come in decades.

  Do you remember the sixties? This is the nineties.
  Soon, I will be in my forties.

  As for my father’s watch, It is on a shelf in my library
  behind a door I am leaving closed

  so he will not see it
  from his vantage in another city,

  a thousand miles away
  and on my mind.

  xviii

  Writing

  After a while it is obvious
  that whatever was my intent,
  this work is not art
  but an untranscendental meditation,
  nothing more than a talking
  to myself.

  xix

  What I Did Today

  What I did today, today
  I had my shoes shined in a

  barber shop with a striped pole
  and the two traditional

  barbers, who wore white, and an
  elderly Negro shoeshine

  guy, just shining shoes as if,
  I know, it was as if, if

  he was nobody to you,
  then you were just a scuffed shoe.

  xx

  1998

  Grief is the shadow cast by love.
  It is months after your death, and I am dealing, but with what?
  With passing a point of no return, for one thing.
  I used to think that you could do anything, now I have learned you cannot come back.
  So, where are you?
  I used to wonder, sophomoric, what is it like, after I die?
  One of my roommates answered same as it was before you were born.

  xxi

  Trip

  This life is an unplanned trip, summer in the mountains, a three-week vacation that seems
  endless at the outset, but then only three days are left.
  Then two, then one.

  xxii

  Afterlife

  The ones who will survive us want to live without us.
  They put us out of sight.
  They no longer listen, if they ever did.

  There is little we can do about it.
  We can’t speak up.
  We can rebuke them with our silence
  when we are nothing but silence.

  xxiii

  Noted

  I was listening to my thoughts.
  Like birds, they were singing to the dawn while it was still dark.
  I tried writing it all down in longhand
  in the black notebook I take with me when I travel.

  On the move, I keep my hand moving
  and my opinions to myself.

  xxiv

  Remembering English Prosody Over Glasses of Wine

  Benzenger Cabernet, Stevenot Zinfandel,
  beautiful, liquid, ruby anapests,
  or are they dactyls?
  I cannot remember which is which,
  these names from Saintsbury’s History of English Prosody
  asleep in the corner of my memory,
  curled up near the embers of a dying fire,
  or shelved with the dust and the dead skins of bugs,
  and dry as Cabernet, and slightly acidic.

  xxv

  Just A Minute

  If I only have a minute, this is the minute I have.
  And if I have eighty years, or ninety?
  This is still the minute I have.

  xxvi

  Wind

  Where does it come from, where does it go
  the wind that stirs the flowers in their beds.
  The trees in the yard tremble.
  The last brown leaf on the red oak
  tugs on its stem, at the tip of a thin branch.
  The birds flying into it give into it.
  They are drafting downward on their wings,
  their eyes on the holly berries.
  Where do they come from and where do they go,
  The thoughts that are unheard sounds
  of souls whispering,
  the striving, the fear, the breath
  that is life,
  so ordinary, so miraculous.

  xxvii

  Lucky Stone

  The mystery is impenetrable,
  the pale, thrilling beauty of the light in my eyes,
  like the smooth stone from the riverbed this morning
  and my astonishment
  seeing the fossilized remains of a leaf in the stone.
  I want to put that stone in my pants pocket,
  where it will be cool and sleek,
  comforting, a talisman of the ages, always there.
  I want to be my own lucky stone.

  xxviii

  No Wonder My Daughter Doesn’t Speak To Me

  My fifteen-year-old said chill, don’t stress me.
  I answered, achieve, achieve.
  I try to fill her with a stream of piety,
  when she’s a sieve.
  Lifting my commandments above my head,
  I hurled them at her dreams.

  xxix

  Life As Wallpaper

  A repetition of white squares on a black field.
  Or red chevrons, rough edged
  to look as though they were painted by hand
  and not machined and mass produced.
  But the point of the pattern is the pattern.

  xxx

  In The Cemetery

  Written on a headstone:
  He did his errands.

  xxxi

  Keepsakes

  In the house of a collector,
  pewter,
  platinum,
  silver,
  and, in a grey hutch, twenty-one white rabbits,
  and forty-two red eyes.

  xxxii

  Sofa

  In every possession, a foreshadow of loss,
  and leftovers of frozen sorrow.
  This sofa is going to Goodwill or The Salvation Army.
  The sofa we sat on reading Pierre and Are You My Mother to our children.
  Later we recovered it in stripes.
  And you sat on it during your final illness
  while I injected you with heparin flushes through a port in your chest.
  I am not interested in goodwill or salvation right now.
  The guys are taking it in their white pickup.
  Sergio, Luis, they may decide to keep it for themselves, con permisso.
  They have my permission.
  I can open the freezer door and see it anytime
  in the small cold light.

  xxxiii

  Eyes

  Yes, windows of the soul.
  Yes, yours are blue.
  But they are more icy than sunny,
  more glacier than sky,
  a moraine with traces of gravel and star,
  or equations with an x and y that made sense at first,
  but became unsolvable.

  xxxiv

  Breathing

  God, they say, is as near as breathing,
  but no closer than the farthermost star,
  like a house light on a hillside,
  familiar, but not really.
  And some of that breathing is gasping,
  some is sighing.
  There are breaths that are deep and easy.
  Others are quick, anxious.
  So few of all these breaths are mine.
  How many?
  A number that can be counted,
  but not one that can be counted on.

  xxxv

  Unwilling

  My voice is the voice heard in the desert
  from the God of our Fathers,
  who asked Abraham to sacrifice
  his son, his only son.

  God asked for something He did not want,
  but He definitely wanted something.
  Willingness, for Abraham to be willing.
  And so I am asking you:

  Offer me the thing you value most.
  And in exchange, I would give you my blessing.
  But you remain unpersuadable
  and unwilling to worship me.

  xxxvi

  Arguments

  When it comes to using words to unravel
  the tangle of an argument, no surprise, they don’t.
  They are more likely to tighten the noose around my neck

  Better if I take a smile from the toolkit.
  Not the needle nose sneer,
  not the big smile that unscrews into laughter either.
  Our differences are no laughing matter.

  If I smile shyly, what reply could you make?
  You can only smile in kind.
  But if I say something, no matter what, anything,
  you will answer, guaranteed,
  and also in kind.

  xxxvii

  Bedtime

  The outside cat is in for the day.
  The finches are sounding off, protesting in their birdcage.
  One of the dogs is in an armchair,
  The other lies on a white bedspread.
  Do these dogs remember how we chose them from the litter?
  They were puppies in the bed of a pickup
  in a parking lot at WalMart.
  But that was years ago, and they have already forgotten yesterday.

  This is the household where I belong, at least for now.
  Dogs, cat, birds, humans, connected and also hidden, like Russian dolls.

  It is bedtime. Three children are in their rooms. Pam is sleeping.
  To get to her, I pass the large florescent rectangle
  of the aquarium in the kitchen,
  with its bottom of small brown pebbles
  and the fish I forgot to mention.

  xxxviii

  My Son Went To College For A Year

  Baggy blue jeans, woolen cap,
  fifteen pounds overweight from alcohol and sloth,
  he could be a panhandler on the street,
  rather than a college student failing his classes
  and passing time.

  Unwilling to cross the intersection of childhood and maturity,
  it would do him no good to notice
  how cloudless the sky is,
  how groomed the lawns of the quad,
  or the fact that nobody who looks at him has an inkling
  that he is anything other than a handsome,
  precious young man,
  were I to point that out to him.

  xxxix

  Learning from Larry King
  
  The author of The Purpose Driven Life appears on The Larry King Show.
  He says our lives are nothing but preparation.
  And that this cursory, disappearing life is only preparation for the next life, which is everlasting.
  My sprinkler throwing its evanescent spray over the beds of azalea blooms that will fade —
  preparation.
  The white shirts, bagged in plastic, brought back from the laundry by my spouse, who ran off
  this weekend to her house in the country, irritated with me, and leaving me in the city to keep
  house by myself – preparation.
  So, I have all weekend to prepare. I will think of this morning as a core course. I will sit with the
  others in the big lecture hall, some of us taking notes, some doodling, and half listening to the
  distant lecture, which is given by the sunshine.

  xl

  Trial Balloon

  The sky is light as a feather
  over the church spires and the gas stations,
  the lake to the left and to the right
  of a ribbon of highway.
  What would it take to be free of my weight?
  Not much.

  To be like a birthday party balloon
  let go by a child,
  and simply fly upward, trajectory determined
  by the breeze and natural law.

  Unnoticed at first, there might be no alarm.
  A child might point at my vanishing
  and release a cry
  from the orb of a mouth.
  The heads of the others at the party
  might tilt up for a moment,
  as I ascend to my destination, out of sight
  and then out of mind.

  xli

  The Laws of Your Nature

  Sometimes your are the body in motion
  that tends to stay in motion,
  other times, the body at rest
  staying at rest.

  Shifting from hip to hip,
  you are solving for the cold spot
  on a convex pillow
  with a concave cheek,

  defying the forces of inertia,
  but demonstrating their corollary,
  restlessness,
  and using the constant of uneasiness

  to measure the distance and speed
  that thoughts will race
  between the pillar and the post,
  plotting which is which.

  Let us posit the pillar is the stone one,
  grooved, classical.
  The post, then, will be the wood,
  cedar and untooled.

  xlii

  Drowning

  However difficult
  releasing your breath under water is,
  it can be done.
  First step, hold on.
  Then, let the compound of air and panic
  balloon in your lungs.
  Second step, hold on longer,
  hold on, hold on, hold,
  hold, hold.

  xliii

  Geographies
  
  Leaving an orchard of hopes,
  you pass through a field of regrets
  and other geographies
  of aging, to reach your interim destination,
  the tabletop,
  and its hedgerows of books.
  There, the green stone Buddha sits in crusted dirt.
  You also find the silver letter opener
  the dish with foreign coins.
  and the three framed photographs
  where you can hide for a time behind the smiles.
  There is a pool of light, and shadows.
  Just wade through them,
  without stepping on the skirt of a lampshade.
  As for the leaves that are falling,
  they are all outside,
  on the other side of the window,
  with its lake of black glass and further reflections.

  xliv

  As It Is Written
  
  As it is written, in the end of days earns the respect that we accord to the archaic,
  though much of what is written is easily disputable, and no use of thus or henceforth will make
  it otherwise.

  The truth is often found in things that were never said, much less written down,
  in a touch, in an unrecorded sigh, and in memories of the same.

  xlv

  No Pity For The Cat

  For reasons that were never discussed with the cat, he is not allowed to spend the night in the
  house, even in the winter when there is frost.

  Does he want to stay on the chair in the living room, if he cannot stay in the bedroom on the
  comforter? The comforter is white as a field of snow, but much warmer.

  He would settle for the flagstones that border the fireplace and retain heat from the gas fire
  keeping both of us warm, before I turn the stem in the floor counterclockwise, or is it clockwise,
  on my way to bed.

  But it is not his choice to make. He expresses no opinion. Like a good cat, he leaps from the
  cradle of my arms, with claws out, as I open the kitchen door, his almond eyes half-awake but
  widening.

  xlvi

  Rejection

  Is this love, this longing for someone who is happier without me?
  If so, there is no shame in it.
  I should write a poem and send it.
  I could say, here is a gift you do not want,
  these letters on your screen,
  this prayer of serifs and syllables.
  Read it silently
  so you will not hear the longing or the shame.

  xlvii

  Math

  Scientists can tell you about the clouds,
  or the movements of a bird, why its head bobs
  as it watches from the branch of a bois d’arc tree.
  I am not telling you about that.
  I am focused on the fraction of your life left,
  the numerator smaller and smaller,
  the denominator a constant.
  There is room in your world for cloud and bird,
  but not for long.

  xlviii

  Remodeling Lessons

  To remodel, you must picture how things will be.
  Still, it is difficult to imagine the new front door of my house,
  a heavy Honduran mahogany, closing without me.
  Or that the oil-rubbed bronze of its hardware has a life of its own.
  Its marine spar varnish will fade in its own sweet time.
  Even the days of the street address numbers,
  the stainless Helvetica that I selected so deliberately and installed
  on the lemon-colored brick column at the street,
  those days are numbered, too.

  xlix

  In A Dark Wood

  I am putting a blaze on the tree.
  Outside the territory of the known, markers are needed.

  I am looking for a hidden blossom in these woods,
  the hurrah of the flower that opens
  at the end of the season.

  l

  Aphorisms

  If the less said, the better, it is because, on most subjects, the last word has already been
  spoken.

  When it is time to start over and too late to do so, praise the unfinished.

  li

  Questionable Wisdom
  
  Always ask how a situation, any situation, can help you grow, how it can teach you to treat
  yourself and others with loving-kindness. That is what I have read, and it may be wisdom. But
  that is not what I was asking in the Italian restaurant, tapping my fingers at the bar, waiting for
  my lunch order to-go. I was growing more and more impatient. And in this situation, all I asked
  was, how hard is it really to make a calzone.

  lii

  None of the Above

  With no sense of the right answer, I am filling in the ellipse as neatly as I can, blackening it with
  the No. 2 pencil as I have been instructed.

  liii

  Time Marches On

  In October it might be wearing its velvet robe.
  Other times, barefoot in July.
  But always a little behind me, looking over my shoulder,
  and marching at the same pace
  until it passes me by.

  liv

  Dementia

  Much of her life is unremembered, as though it never was.
  She cannot describe her face, though it meets her in the mirror.
  She peers through the fog of her worries,
  which are less real than the fog.
  What happened to her?
  That is a question she can never answer –
  much less, how it happened to her.

  lv

  Considering The Horoscope

  If the 27th of June were my birthday,
  then the months ahead will be eventful.

  I should take a deep breath
  and get ready for the fun and games.

  Also, I need to believe
  in myself and my dreams,

  because the world
  needs my compassion and courage.

  But since today is not in fact my birthday,

  and the new moon is falling
  into one of the more expansive areas of my chart,

  my thoughts can still be remarkably positive.
  That’s good.

  After all, what I think about now
  will be my reality later.

  So I must focus on my highest ideas.
  Also, truth be told, on my mortality.

  Circling the zodiac, naming the signs,
  I wonder

  what will the future 27ths of June be like
  after I die.

  The same, I forecast, as they were
  before I was born.

  lvi

  Problem Solved

  How will you go about finding that thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you? Meno

  It is not a problem. Happens every day.
  You can find the unknown in combinations of me and no,
  and in the ell that floats, unforeseen but not unseen, in every salmon
  and in every alphabetical order,
  just as you will find it hidden in the back of a sock drawer,
  or see it in any color,
  even in the thimbleful of red that is redder than the bucketful.

  lvii

  Revelation

  The snake offered an apple but I did not bite.
  Far more than flesh or food,
  sleep tempted me.

  In a dream I saw parades of the living and the dead.
  also illuminations, lamentations,
  a blood-stirring anthem,

  but then I woke to loss and fading remembrance.
  There was nothing to decode or decide.
  Nothing to suppose,

  just the posing of the morning,
  the kettle on a circle of flame on the stove,
  and the hiss.

  lviii

  Revelation Too

  Then there was the time I pointed a finger at the clouds
  and kept both feet on the ground,
  the moment I sold cleverness
  and bought bewilderment, like a mystic.
  That was the moment I knew my destiny, my future.
  Like the apple hanging on a bough,
  It was waiting for me to break its skin.
  In a single bite, I would taste everything to come,
  the taste of everything I will lose.

  lix

  Goldfish

  The goldfish in my pond do not know their fate any better than I do,
  but they know not to ask the air for answers.
  When I end up, I will be belly up too, though not floating.
  I will be in a box under some grass.
  Or I may choose otherwise.
  In that case, I will be in a furnace, ablaze in a heat
  as orange as any goldfish,
  my body turning as powdery as fish flakes.
  I will be one and done. I will be ash and bits of bone.
  If there is nothing more to it than that
  (or even if there is something),
  so be it.

  lx

  Yehuda Amichai

  Reading the love poems of Yehuda Amichai,
  it is obvious even in translation
  that all of this has been felt before,
  the leaving, the heartbreak, the remembering.
  What has already been said can only be said once again.
  Breaths have been taken many millions of times,
  but everyone still wants to breathe.
  So carry on, keep at it.
  The task is not only to carry it,
  but to lift it up.

  lxi

  Mark Strand

  A cloud is a thought without words.
  Who said that? It was the poet Mark Strand.
  And although this definition
  appeared in one of his poems of course,
  not in a dictionary,
  how necessary it is, how very useful.
  Mark Strand has answered the question
  What form is it in, then?
  when somebody says I have an idea
  but can’t put it into words.

  lxii

  Another Aphorism

  Life’s a mystery, breath miraculous, and death an illusion is a statement so true even its
  opposite is true.

  lxiii

  On and Off Highway 5

  Oleanders divide northbound from southbound
  all the way to Oceanside.
  White trunks and the peeling bark of eucalyptus,
  beach towns, the dark surf,
  all of it is so familiar.
  Two yellow-legged gulls strut on the sand,
  birds with red spots on their beaks.
  They are not a couple,
  but I am calling them that anyway.
  It seems to me that the waves have edges,
  while the sand
  feels like it always does,
  like eternity,
  like happiness that is still available,
  but only as much of it as I am willing to accept,
  and not a grain more.

  lxiv

  Six Sevens and Two Fours

  Syllables are stumbling blocks,
  rocks mortared with no rhythms,
  occupied preoccupied,
  spasms of speech

  and no chance of getting through,
  misheard as misunderstood,
  regardless irregardless,
  same difference.

  lxv

  Worshiping

  Rituals, language, tunes.
  That is how I worship when I congregate.
  Better to sit still at home,
  the rain like popcorn on the rooftop.
  What am I in this rain?

  Dry, thank God.
  The round face of the clock is all mouth,
  saying how early it is,
  also, how late.

  lxvi

  Advice

  Revise and revise again.
  That is advice for improving this writing.
  Better to go deeper than further.
  That is advice for life.
  To see no difference between gain and loss,
  good news and bad news—
  that is yet another wisdom,
  if the goal is either serenity or indifference,
  two qualities that are sometimes represented
  by the Buddha,
  other times by the cat.

  lxvii

  Failure

  Failure comes in varieties.
  There is the failure of the pale moon
  hiding behind a cloud,
  the tobacco that fails to stay lit

  in the black bowl of a pipe,
  and the cookie’s failure to stay crisp
  dipped into hot tea.
  The banker fails to become a doctor,

  the doctor is no businessman.
  A wise man wrote
  that every man sooner or later
  judges himself a failure.

  Then there is the boy with no ambition,
  who fails to try.
  That is the starkest of the failures,
  or it is his wisdom.

  lxviii

  Lilies in Oceanside, California

  My sister must have put them there,
  these plastic stargazer lilies
  on the table in the dining room,
  as she redecorated.
  She is the one in charge of remodeling
  this house on Delos Way
  the two of us inherited from our parents.
  The green cut stalks are glued to the bottom of the glass vase.
  There are three plastic blooms and, on one stalk,
  two closed buds that will never open.
  Closed plastic buds? There to make the lilies
  more realistic, I suppose.
  To suggest that change is coming,
  even though it isn’t.

  lxix

  Eulogy

  He walked across the earth but left no footprints.
  To be fair, the ground was hard.

  He lived a whack-a-mole life,
  smacking at one problem after another.

  He wandered, as a sheep might, herded by events,
  and cried out, but none of it was recorded.

  Whatever his achievements were,
  those trophies are encased in an empty hallway.

  lxx

  Late Night

  Mouth yawning.
  The clock tick tocking.
  Tired from the time you woke up.
  Time’s up.
  Still, staying up.

  lxxi

  The Photo Album from 1986

  Medusa memories, do not look at them.
  Or do, if you want to stop moving.

  lxxii

  Bible Story

  Pursued, the Israelites hurried through the splitting of the sea.
  Ahead, wilderness.
  So miraculous, in retrospect, that they never bothered to note
  how the sea spray felt on their faces as they crossed.
  Did it wet their skullcaps, if they wore those?
  And was the sand dry, or a wet dark seabed under their sandals,
  If they were even wearing sandals.
  Hard in that haste, they took places on the other side, some of them singing.
  Did they already know the words?
  Was it a tune familiar from Egypt, or a new one made up on the spot?
  Difficult as it may have been to remember and include these details in the story,
  it is even harder to imagine them, after the fact.

  lxiii

  Metaphor

  Gardens are planted, tended, nurtured.
  You create them.
  A jungle, on the other hand, doesn’t need you.
  And it is dangerous in jungles.
  So you decide that your life as a garden
  and you are its gardener
  here to tend it,
  even though every ljfe, in fact, is a jungle,
  and your life is in danger.

  lxiv

  Reading Rilke

  How many times have I tried to read these praised pages
  and had no answer to the question,
  “What is this even about”?
  I have scraps of paper on my desk that make more sense,
  grocery coupons past their date,
  a postcard announcing an art exhibit that ended two years ago,
  an unopened seed packet from 1988,
  a page from a prescription pad — the doctor is retired, maybe dead;
  also, Ideas for travel, names of hotels,
  a pamphlet telling me how to explore Glacier Bay,
  and a list of recommended books, including one with the title
  It’s Never Too Late To Begin Again.

  lxv

  Recurring Dream

  I am backstage in an empty theater.
  The show is over.
  The spectators, which is all they ever were,
  are leaving the theater to go home or, some of the couples,
  out for a drink first.
  They have their own lives,
  which have nothing to do with my dream.
  In this dream, there is clean-up to do in the theater.
  It is urgent, I must do it, it must happen
  before the next showtime,
  which is a production that will star someone else.

  lxvi

  From Here To There

  As the crow flies, that is how you judge distance?
  As if a bird or any other living being ever traveled a straight line.
  You might as well make music as the crow sings, cawing.
  Only the mythical crow makes a beeline.
  And even the bee buzzes on an unpredictable path,
  jumpy and turbulent.

  lxvii

  What Would Du Fu Do?

  Li Bai and Du Fu have their moons
  and night skies.
  What would they make of these stacks
  of paperback books on my table

  near a coffee cup?
  They have the reflections of the moon
  in rivers they step into.
  What would they have done

  with these pipe ashes on a white tray,
  the MacBook laptop screen,
  a postcard
  and a blue Bic lighter?

  They have the cry of a wild goose,
  and a distant mountain, a gate to the village
  and the thatched hut.
  Also, the ink and the paper scroll

  and the 20 or 40 characters,
  handmade, as elegant as skeletons,
  five of them in every row,
  the rows in stacks of four or eight.

  lxviii

  Reading Li Po

  So many of his poems are the same poem.
  An observation of the night sky.
  He hears the rustle of autumn leaves.
  A woman sits at her loom,
  or looks toward the moving river.
  There is the watchtower.
  Someone may be waiting for a husband to return
  through the mountain pass.
  All this happens in English.
  And on the facing page,
  the lines of Chinese characters square up,
  flush left flush right,
  sometimes in four rows, other times in eight.

  lxix

  Reading Szymborska

  When reading Wistawa Szymborska’s poetry,
  I want to learn Polish,
  not out any unhappiness with the translations,
  but because her poems are so nourishing reheated
  that one wonders
  what they would taste like fresh.

  Even as leftovers
  they have an aroma of the bloodlands
  the places of my grandfathers’ grandfathers,
  of Dubrowna and the Dnieper River
  and Piatra Neamt.
  They are seasoned with the salt

  of the million square kilometers
  that were once the Kingdom of Poland.

  lxx

  Window

  Between the time you tell yourself
  you are too young
  and the day you decide you are too old,
  a window opens.
  Excuses will still come in.
  Ignore them.
  Instead, live your life,
  Your uneventful, insignificant
  lucky life.

  lxxi

  Passing

  When you are wise
  to truth and lies,
  you are unbewildered by freedom.
  Wintergreen,
  you have studied and learned from
  this passing scene.

  lxxii

  Aging

  So many things you need to throw out
  but do not want to.

  So many leftovers
  that leave a pleasing aftertaste.

  So many melodies
  you may want to listen to again.