These poems reprinted from "Ode to My Autumn" (c) 2017 Antrim House Books
Making Way
We naked men with liver spots and parchment skin attached to what is underneath with fraying cords stare from beyond the pond as a naked mother leads her procession of naked newborns up Commonwealth, across Arlington and into the Garden. From a cumulus directly overhead a bass voice loudly commands, "Make way for Neonates!"-- astonished crowds part as babies commandeer the paddleboats and splash in the affirming sun. Their mother's breasts swell and point upward as she smiles strangely at us— our spots darken, skins crackle as the late afternoon breeze lifts them from their subcutaneous moorings like spinnakers billowing on a downwind tack. We nod to one another— time to do our duty. The wind picks up. Billowing, our parchments pull us upward, beyond sight, while far below, with treble glee the newborns splash about, mindless of the water's rippled warnings. Ode to My Autumn
I go to museums and find the colors faded. Canaletto's gondoliers have browned in the dusk, their songs muffled within the dusty frame. Brueghel's peasants, noses in the haystacks, bottoms to the sky, toil joylessly in a parched brown field. I curl up in a hayloft, beside a creaky door, hoping to breathe in odors of solace-- but grain is floating to the threshing floor; shuddering, the apple suffers its worm's first kiss. In the bedroom, in the early dusk, I read to her aloud my favorite poem, pausing in each stanza to hold back tears. Keats is not the only one-- Milton, Shelley, Hopkins,Yeats: they sing the living notes of loss that, read aloud, restore me to a sad felicity, the poems, the sounds of a Bach cantata, the touch of her hand. Dear Emily
I can remember a time much earlier in my life when I think I would have loved you very much. You were shy, shyer even than I, and would not have pressed me to the edge of failure and shame, and your very plainness, Emily, would have comforted me, as I would not have had to worry about the brawnier, smoother boys, and you would have taught me poetry, and I would not have had to wait so long to discover what I should have been in love with all along-- we'd have been so sweet together, Emily, but for a darkish thought that hovers like a small rain cloud barely covering the sun, that I never really understood you— I felt I ought at least to make some sense of what a girl friend means when she speaks, but with you — how shall I say this-- I never did— no, not at all, and besides-- those dashes, Emily— those infernal dashes-- stopping, starting, stopping, starting again-- and trying to read you once more nowadays-- I get to the right side of your dash-- and cannot remember— what had been-- on the left. |
Running in the Grove Street Cemetery
A gravedigger smiles and waves as if to say, "Go ahead, they're not my people either—" recognizing a fellow trespasser, one not dressed for concourse with the dead. Their dwelling place is blest: macadam paths spring upward, lift my soles; the air is charmed with the scent of gardenias. But they are not. Their graven faces, chiseled out of desiccated stone proclaim that death is no dancing matter, and those who tread on them with disrespect must take their celebrations elsewhere. In the Old Jewish Cemetery in Prague there are no paths. By tens of thousands corpses piled upward force the surface above surrounding streets. Gravestones sprout this way and that; names fade before my eyes. No paths. Nowhere to run. No air. Get out fast. Run along the Vltava. Past the bridge. Breathe deep again. Now listen! Across the river an unseen chorus sings in minor key a folksong of undetermined provenance-- a dirge perhaps? Or could it be Hatikvah? The sounds are faint. I cannot tell. Aubade
Scared of dying in my sleep, I keep awake, and as we also die awake, I ease into sleep, jolting into high alert at lid’s descent. for I have talked to those whose love for me comes parceled out in gifts of candor, who peer at me and see the pocks and crags and tell me I am soon to die and will be missed. They thank me for listening to them tell me what every threshold soul deserves to know, and I thank them for their unleavened words, and iambic rhythms of gentle agreement let my exhausted eyelids find their rest, and I think I may have survived the night– unless, as I walk into the morning’s drizzle, a mist of gray hallucination has settled on a planet not my own, and I lurch this way and that, in search of other souls to lead me to the landing where a ferry waits. |