I’ve written a book
that just came out,
and as I held it
in my hands last night
after reading a few pages,
I felt the current of all
my sixty-nine years
flowing between
those covers.
How can that be?
There are so
many mysteries.
I can remember
when I was three,
sitting in the little sandbox
in the courtyard of our
Mr. Woods sits, afternoons, on the porch
of the grey stone house across the street.
A daughter sometimes sits with him and knits.
“Cancer,” our neighbor Millie told us once.
Once or twice, while walking to his car,
Dad waves and says, “Hey Woody,” and that’s all.
A thick veil separates our dual worlds.
I watch their lives, a kind of pantomime.
His wife comes out sometimes and stands there too,
wearing her apron, then goes back inside.
Silent movies must have been like this.
What knowledge can resolve the mystery:
why lives in some homes open to my gaze,
while others on this same street stay opaque?
On our own side of Waterman I know
in happy, easygoing neighbor ways
In autumn, going for
a walk or drive
brings visions
of apocalypse.
The trees burn
slowly, singing
“This is your
fate, too.”
So glorious is their song
that in this season
life, death and rebirth
are one, with nothing
to be feared.
Lest anyone imagine
a solid wall
between the worlds
of history and fiction:
This Morning:
In the novel
I’m listening to in my car,
I hear how Minka, the title character,
is marched from Auschwitz,
escapes, then is re-captured
and sent to Bergen-Belsen.
This Afternoon:
My friend Stewart
posts a D-Day tribute
on his Facebook page,
a photo of soldiers
The hitch-hiker I
remember best
was someone you
might call a hobo.
Lord knows what he’d
been through to receive
a gift that some folks get
who’ve borne so much.
He traveled light.
He owned a little pack,
a little dog;
that’s all.
I drove for fifty miles
before he turned
his head to me
and said,
I’m working on a major work on cities
To tell people they are all the same,
and different—
That we live through these cities
To transform all our personal cities
Into an Ideal City,
The ideal remnants of our experiences,
Our loving goodbyes to this world.
To know cities we must go off somewhere
A year, two years, maybe five,
Then come back. Go off to a desert,
To the top of a mountain somewhere
And live with the eagles’ Creeeeeeee
In the high clouds,
Then come back and see
The buildings reaching clouds,
The open hand said
to the closed fist:
“Try this!”
The closed fist
said: “Afraid.”
The open hand said,
“You’ll be part
of Everything!”
The closed fist replied,
“Inside my cave
I must yet cling.”
Open Hand:
“Are you clenched
in anger?”
Closed Fist:
“Deep down, it’s more
I looked up at the
sky. Clouds covered me, wrapped me
up like a blanket.
Pretty clouds today.
But now the sun has gone down,
and I must go too.
Four more flights of stairs—
each more tiresome than the last—
then rest I at home.
The way light stops on the side of the white house,
works with bare trees to make shadows on the grass.
Clouds in their colors: yellow, purple, blue, gray.
What moonlight does to snow. How streetlamps
change houses. Icebergs in context. The shapes
of men and machines against the mountains and the sky.
The sawmill I passed every day and did not see
until I saw it hanging on a wall, every log and wisp of smoke.
The house that anchored the old farm
where last winter my old neighbor died.
Smashed with a fingertip.
My blood smeared
on my arm. The unity
of all being. Black flies
so easy to kill. A whale
cruises the shore, tide
coming in. We pour wine,
unzip the netting to drink.
There is no end
to the road,
just a sign it stops,
and trucks, bulldozer, a man
who laughs when we get out
to see.
The end
of the road. After that,