
The Region
To drive past Coop City late on Saturday night
Is to see what the human worm can weave –
The coral towers stand out their lights against
The pitch-night Sound, our Venetian spires
On mudflats of the Connecticut coast,
The myriad lives within and lighted rooms,
The bearing up and soldiering on, the silent need
And leaving homes,
And heavy streaming roar of traffic passing years,
The many lives within like myriad calls
Of birds first light
Who voice the mate, the build and share,
The broken shells and fallen young –
How like and yet most unlike indeed.
Shapes of the Word
Sun-shaped, dressed in a moo-moo
Yellow and ungainly bright,
She appeared at my door to ask a simple question,
To which I made a gruff reply, being choked
With papers to be graded.
Nudged by thought or heart, I looked up,
When she had gone
And saw only the air of her departure,
The bountiful fault line in time
Remained as I ran where I sat, still hadn’t fled
Some momentary after-image of her,
Frictionless, generative,
The air within air on the move, silent sparks
Along the jam.
Between worlds a pinole of light
Gave what’s there and gone
In the doorway’s frame, a flashing fish,
The lightning face on the shroud’s vanish,
Asking no more
Than to break bread in kind words,
And still she left me this.
Wedding
In the courtyard the lyre and the flute resound.
Young men dance and women stand aside and watch.
Among the guests, configuring the whole, one man
Stands up from the bottom of the grave his assembled dust:
Funnel meeting funnel, rim to rim, expanding
In either direction, the thought of his heart, the empty
Fills. Clapping vibrates from the mouths
Of cut-stone jars and day-coals burn.
People of the town, do you smell the travelling flame
Expand its canopy? You who saw the torch-lit crowd
Pass at dawn, when the buildings flashed with light
And song, do you hear the music coming down like the eyes
Of the translating man who rises from the river.
Are you
But the memory of sunshine
In winter when love no longer lives?
Where are you when we need you, whose book declares
That there will be a spring, but now, right now,
Come around,
Fill the jars,
When smoke of stove-fire fills the air.
Sunshine’s gone when he disappears,
Who gives us what we need, casts a light
And lights around the dark
That still means the world for us;
Come around,
Fill the jars,
When smoke of wildfire fills the air
And songs of long ago the wedding dance.