He wouldn’t be me

---

His face grey, fingernails filled up with muck
He sits outside the store change filling his cup
“Change that’s ironic,” I say with a smirk
“Why don’t you change your clothes and go find some work”

“I’ve made only great choices to be in this position
I’ve made careful, and cautious, and chary decisions
I’m a product of hard work and all my ambition
There is no excuse to be in his condition

If I do know one thing, it’s this, I guarantee
I couldn’t be him and he couldn’t be me”

I continue to stroll on my way to the office
when I’m met with a tray of boiling hot coffee
“Oh my god, sir, how can I say sorry”
I look up and here’s what I say to the body

“You idiot, nitwit, no brain having nothing
Thank you for helping this country become what it’s becoming

You’re not fit to see, or breathe, or talk
You shouldn’t feel glee, a day that you walk

No one will cry on the day you die I decree
Cause no one will care when nothing ceases to be

If I do know one thing, it’s this, I guarantee
I couldn’t be him and he couldn’t be me”

His desk is 2 sizes bigger than anyone else in the office
Every pencil and paper has its place, his space is just flawless

He likes work so much, it’s where he’s obeyed
He likes work so much because at home he’s afraid
Not of the dark, or the ghosts that may roam
He’s afraid of his home cause at home he’s alone

When he’s at work atop his pristine mirror tower
He looks at the street scowling a scowl of scowls

“Lazy, low-life, leeching, lackeys
Pea-brained, putrid, pedestrian, filth
I hate them I hate them with all that I am
I hate them more than they could possibly understand”

Maybe it’s true they couldn’t be him in his throne
But what is a throne when at home you’re alone

Storks with Poulets, Peanuts with Pineau

“Consciousness of reality is itself a way of being in the world.”
Being and Time

They sail sphinx-like beyond the house, spread out
White threads plowing Charente’s Atlantic path
While imperious Blanche and good Grise strut clucking
Gastronomy upon the bugged-up lawn.

Darling, were this a wine tasting stranger,
Goobers merely nubile hooters, we might
Say our imaginations’ noble game, well
Thrice removed, is delicately real, pure of mind.

Yet time what it is, our sagging skin, we think
There is more there. And this spring breeze reminds
Us we may play both heaven and earth like
Feathered fools living in a world (of real being there).

The air is soft and tickles down the neck.
This wine fortifies a young imagination.

---

The Water in Our Glasses Moved

---

The water in our glasses moved as did the wine
(Both passed over our table at the time)
While having apéro, say 18:40
When the house shook as though next door a lorry

Gone by took out Émile’s barn in quainter
Dordogne. We sat waiting for some fainter
Tone, but nothing else came—fortunately
No ruin since too far away (ninety three

Miles by frank robin) was epicenter: La Laigne
Had become a strewn-block ghost town, domain
Exposed, church steeple thus toppled, debris
Stoned down on people a peeled catastrophe.

But then our water stilled in our glasses where
Beside the wine on the table we drank with poor care.

Where the Light May End

---

I have traveled so deeply through the temporal spell
that so much of the day
has devolved into remembering.
In my seventh decade,
the path toward tomorrow seems disappearing
and I cannot tell where the light may end.
Impulses to share thoughts and feelings
still ascend.
Yet, so many of the once-smiling listeners
have become my precious memory-beings,
the denizens of empty rooms
that once were melodized by their voices.
So, it is I who smiles in the solitude,
for this air is not ungifted.
Its deep treasures can be recalled and refelt t
hrough memory’s special transporting.
The cycle of life has done what it should,
journeying with me as my companion.
It is another fine day on Planet Earth
and I know this way is good.

---

If It Were Spring

---

If it were spring and I were young,
I would smile down, toward my busy hands,
as I softened the leather of my outfielder’s glove,
stiff and dry from winter’s abeyance,
to be perfectly ready
to play center field for the Brooklyn Dodgers.
The snow would have melted,
and I would be able to smell the grass
as it rerose with brand new blades
of could-come-true.
My sister would walk across lawns with me
to the bus stop to wait for Bus 6,
and we would wonder out loud
who this new “big deal” could be,
this guy called Elvis.
If it were spring and I were young,
we would talk all the way,
even though now she rests
far below the level of earth’s lawns,
below a lovely stone that bears her name and tenure.
If it were spring,
I would trek toward distant woods with my collie,
leaving behind developed plots of land
to sweep across wheat fields,
then step into shadows of the thickened trees
to dissolve into mysteries of wonder.
But, most of all,
I would aspire to find my love,
whom I had yet to meet,
even though I pleasurably glance to see her at this very moment,
far traveled from when she was only a dream.
I could wish it might go on and on, just like this;
I could wish that our bodies could fight off time’s wounds;
and I could wish that a smile might last forever—
if only it were spring and I were young.

A Tumult

---

Her question transported him like Beatrice’s first salute, yet as he looked at her face for the first time he was filled with terror. He was startled by the speed with which her beauty elicited in him a sense of futility and dread. He remembered standing before the Botticelli in the National Museum and recalled his awe before the breathtaking power of the Renaissance masterpiece. He remembered the painting’s most poignant effect on him: it catapulted him upwards and then arrested him in flight. He was brought, by the mystical agency of art, to a sudden awareness of his inability to enter the realm of the work’s sacrosanct power. He passed quickly from contemplating the painting’s transcendence to sensing his own tawdry mortality. The sadness into which he plunged headlong almost as soon as the painting had elevated him resulted less from the fact that the pitch of this sublime moment could not be sustained than from his conviction that, as a moment, it could never be replicated, and this cognizance carried within itself nothing that could mitigate his sense of having fallen, of having been dashed against sharp rocks. The woman asking the question about the archives could not know that, to him, her face seemed to have been fashioned from timeless, numinous materials. Her ignorance of this, moreover, freed her from the burden of such weighty knowledge. For had she been even vaguely aware of the tumult the configuration of features she had inherited was effecting behind the spectacles of the shy librarian, she too would have
been terrified and might have recoiled in horror.

The Window I Wish

---

for my niece Xondra

A window draped with night
like a road in rain reflects
my face, two passing taillights.

The pane is cold and hard and smooth
as polished stone.
Touch stains the glass.

At three a.m. abandoned streets
draw every destination close.
Pain pills. Alcohol. Cocaine.

The coroner’s report was clear.
From an alley view,
what could he know of you?

But the dead are made of what the living write.
No life can be rebuilt
from words we never say.

Maybe a better craftsman
will someday raise a house for you
with a wide window on an avenue:

a window to show you, hold you
arriving home, headlights blazing,
country wailing on the radio—
maybe Patsy; maybe Walkin’, I Fall, Crazy—

maybe with time to listen,
time for a last cigarette.
You inhale…eyes spark.
Sigh…they close against the smoke.

See the high-ceilinged living room?
The richly upholstered easy chair,
a desk for correspondence,
a lamp waiting, always alight?
And reflections. Can you see us
rewritten, reframed—maybe forgiven—
there, both sides of night?

---

Memento Amore

---

The Historic Davenport Hotel, Spokane

Captured, she eludes us.
Farthest foreground in a chair half-turned
from the long table the young woman sits farthest
from the bride, hands in her lap, back straight as if
holding her breath. She alone among the guests
looks away, refusing to return our gaze.

Repolished marble floors. Ceilings repainted
and regilded. Photographs on the mezzanine
reframed, rehung. We’d stop there overnight
that long year of your mother’s dying.

The Peacock Lounge. Beneath a hundred
stained glass eyes, blue-green-yellow feathers,
we’re sitting in a booth recounting countless hurts.
Pain she suffered and inflicted.

Yet there were mornings when it felt enough
just to wake beside you and take in shared rhythms
of our breathing, behind closed eyelids certain
dawn was restoring corners to our room.

Black, white. The only words the camera had
to render her lavish gown, her woven hair. Glass cast
and colored for sightless eyes, wings never spread.
On an unyielding pane our faces faltering, fragmented.
And your mother never changes.

But midnight footsteps in the empty lobby.
Laughter unrepentant from an upper room.
Cigarettes unfurling, glowing endings flying
past windows that still opened. Was I half-
remembering or half-dreaming then?

A lens, I hope, before the shutter.
A renumbered door for new numbered days.
Memory, love, set free.

The photograph: A Wedding Banquet in the Hall of the Doges, 1909.

Loneliness

---

There is a pain
It feels like school dances and crowded carousels
Conversations with no pauses for a breath or a sip of beer
Records left skipping as people filter out of doorways
It is a pain that lingers longer amidst the swarms of bodies
A pain that finds a way to seep through the crowd
I believed it must be loneliness
For loneliness was the chair beside the window at a party
Where no one bothered to sit
Simply because the breeze might pick up and sneak through the cracks of
the old window panes
And who could ever desire the cold
When there is a certain warmth that accompanies the stinging
swig of a drink
And the feeling of her beside you as she brushes against your hand
Yet this pain burrowing in the pit of my chest
This breeze that makes me shudder
Could never be loneliness
Yes, loneliness was a wooden chair
But it was also a joy
Loneliness was knowing that my solitude was not in vain
That looking up at the sky as the clouds fill with rain and lightly spill
That watching the faces change around me when that song
burst forth from the speaker
Was not a nagging sorrow
Yet perhaps a painful delight
For I received a greater amount of satisfaction from observing
Amidst the foaming drinks and the worn out floorboards and the way
the moon looks through the cracks in the roof
I felt at peace
Heartbroken that I may never dip as deeply into the human desires of
the flesh
Yet thankful that it was occurring right before my eyes
So I may watch and detail the events of those winter nights
I saw
Each bit of the pain and the pleasure
And every part in between
Every part that makes us scream our humanity through lyrics
strung together and lights burning too bright
I write
For the people who experience
The people who vanish with their desires far into the night

---

The Fog/A Lighthouse

---

The slow, unrelenting fog
Rolls in from the sea
Is it merely meant to blind and suffocate me?
I stand as strong as a pillar
A beacon through the gray
And watch as the ships I call are still led astray

I once knew true warmth
Amidst the sun and the waves
Amidst the lapping, cool waters
Long painted days
My light reflected across the water’s midnight blue
And was the radiance that brought my aching heart to you

Storms arrive, as they must
Despite how desperately I tried
To let go of the reins
To shed my grounded pride
I once battled the forces that dared to frighten me
Yet summer days soon became but a child’s fruitless plea

I can still hear their screams
The spray and the dust
Hulls splintering against rocks
Anchors tainted with rust
I had become what I most feared
What a sight to behold
A lighthouse unable to combat the wind
Unable to withstand the cold

The fog
Once an idea
Now realized and true
I cannot seem to salvage my heart’s tie to you
Our ship crashed and fractured
Our bright sails torn loose
Solitude is an inevitable, yet merciless truth

I am a lighthouse
Yet was I destined for this?
A solemn existence of which few may wish
Isolated and stoic
Silent and proud
The voices that once whispered within me grow hungry and loud
They clang and they clatter
What a torment, I cry
They make up the hazy mist that settles as it lies
For the solitude that crowds and blinds my true view
Is a fog that no lighthouse may ever break through.

---

Found

---

How do I know if I lost myself
I wanted to scream
From the tops of the buildings
From the chimneys with steam
Yet my voice grew hoarse and my lungs hung sore
For no sound can surface from behind a closed door
How can others play their roles so well
I never did know
From the chrysanthemum’s blossom
To the flurries of winter snow
Everything had a time and a place
A colossal event for which I was unfathomably late
How can I piece myself together
I endeavored to try
With each steady stitch
Behind both tired eyes
The fragments of heart, the prices I owe
Made up someone familiar who had escaped long ago

Icarus

---

I did not ask for you to catch me.
I knew my wings were dipped in weathered wax.
Who are you to prevent me from my fate?
Why fall, if not for devotion?

Thrusting inherently ruptured wings,
our souls met but for a second,
a triumph reserved by the gods.
Warmth, desire, passion incarnate,

I welcome his engulfing fire.
For him, I’d damn myself in the fall of flames,
dancing in the ashes of our eternity.

*

Dancing in the ashes of our eternity
for him. I’d damn myself in the flames.
I welcome his engulfing fire.

Warmth, desire, passion incarnate,
a triumph reserved by the gods.
Our souls met but for a second,
thrusting inherently ruptured wings.

Why fall, if not for devotion?
Who are you to prevent me from my fate?
I knew my wings were dipped in weathered wax.
I did not ask for you to catch me.

Unforgettable

---

Were I a scientist
rather than just
a wondering guy,
I’d study what shows up
like a person in a room
when you look around
and she’s there.

Give me a maze, some electrodes
and a pen skating across a graph,
a rat with obstacles and tasks,
anything for experience,
the kind that sinks
without being missed,
like the girl who came
to school for a year,
then moved away.

I’ll comb the creature’s cortex
for evidence of where memories go
until something lights them in the mind,
or is it more like
a flat rock lifted,
exposing billions,
ready to be revived?

The End of July

---

EB more present in later poems. The figures walking up and down the icy
beach…we stand back from them…we see more of the human condition mimed
out for us than ever previously.
James Merrill, diary entry

We couldn’t tell
if he was digging
for a living or vacation play,
waders stained by salt
and weathered Igloo cooler.
Two kids nearby
looked nothing like him,
nor did their mother
with rolled pant legs,
so there went the grandfather hypothesis.
When my wife asked, “Any luck?”
he shook his head
with a self-deprecating laugh
and said, “But it’s fun.”
Across the tidal strait
lay Duxbury Beach proper,
the one in the Elizabeth Bishop poem with the line
On the way back, our faces froze on the other side.
A sunburned teen
had turned us away
as non-residents,
so we re-crossed the causeway
and settled for this shorter, littered,
waveless substitute,
the old guy and the family
filling in for creamy summer natives.
Instead of walking
in the poet’s vanished sandprints,
I looked down at my wife’s toes
and imagined they were hers.
Passing the clammer on the way back,
we smiled on our other side.

Hometown

---

I have memorized this way of thinking
a road that stretches across the darkest hours
the kind you learn young by the feel of its curves
dips of sunken pavement you could drive blind
the foot moves between pedals
before I am aware, automatic motion and emotion
fused into neural pathways, reflexes travel through the body
the way headlights always find the broken glass
clinging to the rotting wood of a windowpane
on the old barn, rounding
the corner past the graveyard, past
the tombstones for fuel tanks they used to call a gas station

I want to forget this way but there is no other
maybe I can forget this whole town, fallen
left for dead as leaves lifted, floating
in the wake of passing tires
maybe I can unlearn this place
hold my breath when the doctor hits my knee
breathe hard through the tap of the hammer, the impulse
to hit the blinker and make that turn
drive down dark roads that scare me back home
maybe I can close my eyes and grip the wheel
believe that this map unfolds, that if I let go
there will still be road
one more gentle to know and less cruel to learn