SKYWRITING OVER THE ROCKIES
“Oh, darling in the distance
who appears so near,” I whisper
to the back of the chair in front
of me.
All these trips on jumbo
jets you’d think I’d arrived by now
in the Eschaton.
I float down
the aisle in my head and think
of the fuselage as the church
of everywhere at once in which
I’m both here and there, both awake
and asleep with prayer.
I order
a glass of pinot noir, then close
my eyes and make oneiric leaps
in a dream of us in which we’re flying
together like angels, which is why
I suffer the sudden delusion of thinking
I might already be living my afterlife
in a Cloud of Unknowing, never mind
the sudden turbulence and warning sign
to remain seated and buckled up.
“The eclipse of mente and corizon occurs
in the planisphere of our bed at home,”
I write with my trigger finger in the air
as if it were a page in the sky.
“I’m always so regretful in the clouds
because I think I should know more
that I do.
“It’s enough,” I say
to myself, “to know I’m simply
burning, which is to say, imagining
a fire in which I sit like a stone
immune to the flames but aglow.
Alas, I’m ready as we descend
to test my theory of believing
in the music that plays in the silence
of the fields of Sharon, silent as it is
and soul-affrighting.
To lie with you
in a loft somewhere and cup
your breasts and smell your hair
and kiss your lips and close my eyes
and read the text inside my lids:
“Hear the voice of yourself
in the sky that speaks in analects
about how to fly on Earth.”
THE SHAME
I sat in my chair on the porch rocking back
and forth in the August breeze when suddenly
the phone rang waking me from a dream,
flashing the name of an old friend with whom
I’d fallen out of touch decades ago
in the way old friends do without
meaning to. I said, “Hello, old friend,”
at which he echoed me and then, as if
no time had passed at all we started talking
in the way Gerontions do, knowing that
“neither fear nor courage saves us.”
We began by shortening the years into minutes
with news: our children, careers, and wives
until my friend suddenly turned
in a non sequitur to the trip we took
in 1970 to the coast of Maine
when the war was on and neither of us had reported
for duty, deciding instead to disappear
on the lam until our car broke down somewhere,
forcing us then to hitch-hike home
with nothing to show for our crime except our grief
for friends who were dying for reasons no senator
could explain because there were no reasons,
and then the reason why he really called:
to see if I remembered that girl with nothing
on at Eggamoggin Reach, “Amphitrite”
he said. “Remember?” At which I said,
“Say again?” “Goddess of the Sea.” “Oh, yes,”
I answered, “That girl on the cliff.” “Yes,”
he said. “Then you do recall?” “Oh, yes,” I said.
“How could I not?” “But you did, it seems.”
“Only seems,” I said. “I had to think
for a second was all. It was the shame I felt
and continue to feel for where we were on that acre
of heaven so far from the war.” “We had stopped
at a cul-de-sac, remember, and walked for a mile
or so until we came to her on a ledge
preparing to dive from high above, then did:
a stunning swan into the swells where she
remained for over a minute before ascending
with a gasp and cried, “Your turn!” At which
we pretended not to hear and walked
away back to the car like the boys that we still were.
TO THE MUSE
You woke me to a dream of waking
in which I approached you and sang
your name.
When I heard it again in the clouds
and river, I remembered the silence
in the sound of your name when you were here,
as if I were saying it with a voice in my head
that you could also hear and I was listening
for both of us, as you were, too,
and it didn’t matter which since it spoke
in the meadow where we stood both separate
and together, fully involved in musical flames
that accompanied our voices in crimson robes
with holes at their center that were also their mouths.
TRAVELOGUE
I glimpsed at the pad on the passenger seat
on my way home to Putney from Providence
and saw that it was blank in Purgatory Chasm.
With pen in hand in Smithfield, Blackstone, Millville,
Uxbridge, Worcester, and The Quabbin, I had failed
to write anything down while keeping
my eye on the road, which sang a hypnogogic
song of here and there—signs and clouds,
trees and fields. Then suddenly a rune
my father’s college roommate told
at his old friend’s funeral came to mind:
“Life’s the hyphen between the dates.” How merely
true I thought but wrong to say without
adding something else. What’s worse than death
itself than to lose your wit and heart than speak
like a ghost to those still perched on the hyphen?
“Bullshit!” I heard my father shout from inside
his coffin: “Hyphen you, old friend!” It wasn’t
that his “friend” was wrong, but what did he think?
That grief was moot? That that old saw about
a fact of life would suffice? I saw
that obsequies again on the screen of sky—
that huddle we made in the snow ten years ago
on a cold, mid-western day when all I wanted
to do was tip the myriad stones like domi-
noes across the frozen ground and watch
them fall. So there in the spaces between the lines
of the passing lanes on my way home, I read
the code for living beyond and wrote it down
in so many words that rhymed and clanged,
clanged and rhymed: “I’m here. I’m there. I’m gone.”
ODYSSEUS TO CALYPSO, A DEAD LETTER
I lived with you on Ogygia
like a jar fly with catchy timbals.
I was your “angel” with a heart that didn’t sleep.
You said, “Sometimes we burn so clean nothing’s left.”
You said, “Love isn’t enough.”
The leaves were falling.
Everything smelled like falling leaves.
I didn’t believe you.
THE HARSH ADVICE OF LOSS
Let the moment of her leaving keep playing
in the theater of your heart as the final scene
in the film called You And Me zooms in
on her and you at the top of a Grand Central
stair with her weeping for reasons you couldn’t
know at the time but do now.
For the sublime,
enormous city to have seemed so small and infinite
at the same time, your heart needed
to be flooded with loss for it to float your memory
of her now in this unbidden short of your
and her good bye on the giant screen behind
your eyes in which you’re standing with her
on the axis mundi of a cold platform in Grand
Central Station embracing each other and then
kissing in the din of her train arriving from out
of the tunnel’s oblivion.
