Puritan Watch
Longitude was the great mystery
of the age, all those galleons
coursing the seas in parallels,
& of course a clock is not a human heart,
nor did those voyagers hide
even simple, plain-case miniatures,
pewter oval pieces, in their pockets,
finding what ways they could
by dead reckoning, rafts of matted grass,
monitors of sun and moon,
cincture of cinnabar brush & dusk
cinching a stumped field.
I know a clock is not a human, heart-
driven and mapped by blue roads
within. That first soiled ocean passage,
then strictures of frost—of hunger— .
How measure such fear-become-religion?
Tonight, I’ll push time’s hands
back, but tomorrow will still rise in dark
& know the clock is not my heart.
I see it there, over emptied trees,
beside the tarnished moon in wane;
& though she’s an “evening object” now,
my pilgrim Venus wakes at dawn—for you—
Yonder
Within sight but not yet
near, old word for as far as it gets—
as in way beyond this blue sashay
of horizon. Nearer, I should say,
is our orison: us. But also
out of sight a while, for now, it’s true.
“While” being also Old English.
A space of time. A rest.
Restive, restless, though a wile
is a trick, & what are miles
but time upended? As for the press,
the thrum of blood through flesh,
what’s that to death? We know, we know,
as over its edge we go—
Birthday
I want much more than this provincial life . . .
Disney’s Beauty & the Beast
At every window, a tiger eye winks—
tawny & scalloped, scarlet with brink,
the sun chatoyant & metamorphic
behind evergreens that emerald, then silver quickly
in wind, changeable as napped velvet.
Your day calls you outside and into it,
season of broom-shocks, cinnamon sticks, gourds.
Green spider in a pail. Frost-whiskered schoolyard.
Season, now & forevermore, of you, tramping
in pink boots the leaf-tatter, acorns. Your song’s
the future toward which you run,
swinging a red scarf above your head, little galleon.
Ahead, the mysterious thicket ticks, face of a postcard, a clock.
My prayer for you is what’s written on the back.
