Where had I heard this wind before
Change like this to a deeper roar?
What would it take my standing there for,
Holding open a restive door,
Looking down hill to a frothy shore?
Summer was past and day was past.
Sombre clouds in the west were massed.
Out in the porch’s sagging floor,
Leaves got up in a coil and hissed,
Blindly struck at my knee and missed.
Something sinister in the tone
Told me my secret must be known:
Word I was in the house alone
Somehow must have gotten abroad,
Word I was in my life alone,
Word I had no one left but God.
Your love
was a warm, yellow light
shining through white windows
of a green cabin
as I stood alone
at dusk
in the black forest
of my loneliness.
My body ached from weariness
my soul cried out for comfort
I entered
I thought that smiling mask . . .
that lovely smiling mask . . .
was you.
I asked for food
you gave me dried bones on a wooden platter.
Oh, where are the rest of my shipmates,
And why am I not at sea,
And what is this lonely valley
Where no one is but me?
Have they sailed away without me?
Will they ever again return?
I never thought when he was dead
A sailor’s heart would yearn.
Oh, how did I die? In battle?
Or how did I die? Asleep?
Were there any who laughed when they heard it?
Were any too stunned to weep?
But who dressed me up so neatly?
Who brushed and combed my hair?
Some fellow just doing his duty
Or someone who tried to care?
How often had the sun been red
The sky as deep a blue
Behind long, tired stretched-out clouds
When I was then with you.
How often had the evening sea
Which you so much admired
With archipelagos of foam
Been bright and ruby-fired.
Oh, all these things tonight are here
Upon a distant sea,
But I have found no other one
To stand and watch with me.
have all been written down, but still
she has trouble working the TV. She calls
me up to say the device has turned itself off
again, and could I come over and turn it
back on? Just look at the notes Nana,
I say. I wrote the instructions down for you.
It’s a similar story with the microwave,
with its buttons seemingly designed to
perplex her. The internet is a true enigma.
I just don’t know how to manage, now
that he’s gone. The place is just so big,
so empty. And the bills, she says. Michael
used to sort the bills – now I don’t know
what to do. I try to assure her that all is OK,
all is in order, the electricity won’t run out,
the hot water won’t suddenly go cold.
No bowed heads,
you’re the only one
at your funeral.
After three months
staring at the brick floor
Christmas card.
Sometimes I wake up and feel Nebraska,
the whole state sleeping hip-side on my sternum.
I feel the endless roads parting the flood of corn
after a harvest. I rise in line
with the straight standing ghosts, feeling
fellowship alongside their dry family. We are
split ends of the dirt, empty of duty and purpose.
I have no greeting for this day. I have nothing to say
to the sad souls of my friends that are stretched
so far that the tension is almost shouting
fill me, fill me
How can this state be so long? So, nothing
But somehow that nothing is just sadness
you can't name, a Grassman rumored-beast
that passes barely through the edge of a photograph
yet can draw everything into its shadowy stride.
Starting from sleep,
I turn; see
you resting.
But, no. It is
a trick of light.
I remain
among those
who live alone.
Sitting on a bench, lonesome
in a corner of a park
he fills his lungs with green air
and idly he drinks the milk of light.
He rises slowly, and he puts the path,
as a fiction book, in his pocket
walking towards the gate of twilight
where his white-dream night lies ahead.
Every day he repeats this journey
without betraying the day, air or wind
until the twilight runs away from him
or the night locks him in forever.
Mainly the parents do not die.
They just feel lonely
when their children leave the nest,
and they start to miss their own parents.
They go to meet them
and forget to come back.
That’s all.
It is only a moment of forgotten joy
but it lives none-the-less.
Trees
echo the road
and,
unlike the past,
there is no one waiting for me.
I turn to your memory of solace
and pain, needing something concrete as an anchor.
Walls
greyly shadow
and
take away
the light.
Your letter arked our pasts, protecting old lies
and unremembered betrayals.