After the Floods
i
We were sitting and eating
when suddenly the diner
was in rapid motion.
Were we in a boat
speeding across a lake?
I shouted “Make it stop!”
My voice stuck in my throat.
There was no stopping it.
The Miss Lyndonville Diner
was inundated last week.
Breakfasts, lunches, dinners,
decades of everything but memories –
all flowing, flowing, flowing out of sight.
ii
A friend informs me Poet X has died.
I don’t think this is true.
X is eighty-nine.
She looked transparent, lambent
the last time I saw her.
She was about to fly to Italy.
We talked about the floods,
the war, and poetry.
iii
Time to dust the chair.
Dirty white for years,
it now has a new life
since a guest painted it purple last summer.
Why is it so important
to try to delete disorder,
to erase the signs of wear,
as if the decades here
had left no mark, as if
we could begin afresh
each time visitors
arrive with their luggage.
of memories and expectations;
each time a dream delivers
its visionary cargo;
each time the flood, receding,
reveals the soggy remnants,
battered and muddy, also
glistening, transformed.
Cupped Hands
As in a dream, my two hands formed a cup
holding chickpeas poured
from the vessel where they had been stored
two thousand years or more and then dug up –
underground and somnolent until
this dig on Thera. A photo was taken
(for National Geographic, if I’m not mistaken),
my cupped hands modelling the human scale.
It was a chance encounter. I recall
being told by someone in the know
these peas were edible and tasty too,
cooked long enough in water, salt, and oil.
Desiccated, tiny – how could it be
something so ancient still could yield good food?
Bounded by a nutshell, Hamlet said
(or curled inside a lentil or chickpea),
I could count myself a king of infinite
space. Except that nightmares troubled him.
My hands and what they held – was this a dream?
No, I believe it really happened. But
this happened half a century ago
in Santorini. All those years, condensed,
buried, then brought to life, confound the sense
of how to tell the dreamed-of from the true.
Why did that trivial image now come back?
Memory’s long train of tattered lace
trails behind the gown in which I pace
and pulls along surprises in its wake.
What those seeds contained must have been time,
whose hidden harvest, when it’s excavated,
yields a lavish crop to be translated
into some new nourishment, like rhyme.
