I comes up out of the ocean
warm days. It reaches
for inland meadows and sighs
across grass in its cape of rain.
People come to their doors.
They look where the trees turn
grey, where hills have stepped back
of each other. Whatever it was,
It passed carefully, touching
farms, leaning over ponds,
bending down the wheat.
People stand long at their doors.
“You were good this time, August
Old Friend. So long. So long.”
On this fourth day in a row of rain
There is a sameness to the streets broken only by the odd
Brightly painted house—the way those who pass by
In tan or black trench coats look back at the girl
Wearing a yellow slicker. The yellow slicker,
A gift from her aunt who knew London would be wet,
Having lived there herself just after The War,
The Europe she had known transformed to a state
Of the mind, no longer Central but Eastern, far away,
Bombed-out, depopulated, at least of her kind.
But for a girl of nineteen with American thoughts,
Traveler’s cheques, a boy at home, a university
Address, the decline of the West compels less
Than each step she takes through the London rain.
Even these British so accustomed to their weather
Admire the girl in the yellow slicker, as if she
With her uncovered streaming blond hair might shine
As the only sun they will see all wee. Now,
That’s the kind of history she likes to hear.
no dove at all, coo-rooing through the dusk
and foraging for small seeds
My mother was the clouded-over night
a moon swims through, the dark against which stars
switch themselves on, so many already dead
by now (stars switch themselves off
and are my mother, she was never
so celestial, so clearly seen)
My mother was a murder of crows
stilled, black plumage gleaming
among black branches, taken
for nocturnal leaves, the difference
between two darks:
a cacophony of needs
in the bare tree silhouette,
a flight of feathers, scattering
black. She was the night
streetlights oppose (perch
for the crows, their purchase on sight),
obscure bruise across the sky
making up names for rain
My mother always falling
was never snow, no kind
of bird, pigeon or crow
On the then-below-zero day, it was on,
near the patients’ chair, the old heater
kept by the analyst’s couch, at the end,
like the infant’s headstone that was added near the foot
of my father’s grave. And it was hot, with the almost
laughing satire of a fire’s heat,
the little coils like hairs in Hell.
And it was making a group of sick noises-
I wanted the doctor to turn it off
but I couldn’t seem to ask, so I just
stared, but it did not budge. The doctor
turned his heavy, soft palm
outward, toward me, inviting me to speak, I
said, “If you’re cold-are you cold? But if it’s on
for me…” He held his palm out toward me,
I tried to ask, but I only muttered,
but he said, “Of course,” as if I had asked,
and he stood up and approached the heater, and then
stood on one foot, and threw himself
toward the wall with one hand, and with the other hand
reached down, behind the couch, to pull
the plug out. I looked away,
I had not known he would have to bend
like that. And I was so moved, that he
would act undignified, to help me,
that I cried, not trying to stop, but as if
the moans made sentences which bore
some human message. If he would cast himself toward the
outlet for me, as if bending with me in my old
shame and horror, then I would rest
on his art-and the heater purred, like a creature
or the familiar of a creature, or the child of a familiar,
the father of a child, the spirit of a father,
the healing of a spirit, the vision of healing,
the heat of vision, the power of heat,
the pleasure of power.
The heat is deafening
and obliterates distance
until all the panting
ghosts are here
haunting the water faucet,
baring their ectoplasm to
the hard-worked refrigerator.
Nipples galore rise
from the otherworld.
The fans churn and the open-mouthed
unlucky birds stuck
without relief scrap it out
over a few withered blossoms.
Fuck you, the world says.
I’m in here,
too sucked of love to dream.
For a few days a bobcat took
to sunning himself on the roof
of our house. So we prayed
as we entered and prayed as
we left. Fuck you,
sweet dry world, omen and
famine.
1
Those who have already been destroyed
recognize its signs: the sky
clouds like a glaucous eye,
the wind muscles over whatever
is weak. Waves swell, engorged
with too much of something.
A lashing, a swimming of tongues
through air. Birds disappear.
The smell of ocean in the wrong place,
of something diseased, lost fish.
THe sky bellows, darkens, roars
like a drunk.
Those unacquainted with destruction
ask for wind speeds, amount of rainfall,
degree of movement. A plotting,
a computation of the destruction.
2
For some of us, all seasons are hurricane.
The winds gale up, working us like seed,
moving us like desire.
What lies beyond measurement
is all of beauty and terror.
To understand is to evacuate.
You turn towards meteor showers in August,
wishing yourself like that:
bright and burning wholly out.
When feeling finally comes it is
that falling, matter breaking away
from air, the sound
of crickets moving through the grass like fire—
and the strangely twisted metal
in the field that a child finds:
residue, crown.
Then there’s the story of the Chinese sage,
in anger and despair, who cut his body away in pieces,
flung them into the lake.
Each one, becoming finned and whole, swims off.
The leaves have a sense of
where they fall when they
return to earth
but as they dangle in the wind
like corpses swaying
from a branch
they replace the pure
space of their being
with an act of attention
which passes like
a lullaby through
the eye of the storm.
Today the air conditioner broke down.
It’s summer solstice and the hottest day
sa far this year. And old girlfriend (same voice
but weaker) called to say she was divorced,
now living alone in the very house
I grew up in—and how weird she had felt
sleeping there the first night, lying on top
of the covers, thinking back. I thought back
to nights in the heat wave of fifty-five,
when I lay without sheets and without air
conditioning, just fans—nights hotter still
from dreams of her—wondering what the fires
of hell were like. Tonight I want to love
my young wife, her breasts almost miracles
in the firefly-lit and sweltering dark.
Hell is not temperature. Hell is not time.
“like the star beaming outward past its death”
-Robert Wrigley
Every day we die
a little more.
My young son
doesn’t believe me;
with the telescope
he got for Christmas
he points to the stars,
unfailing lights of the past,
as examples of how difficult
it is to kill anything.
Infinity has not yet
begun to trouble him.
As if Pascal’s true
fear of the eternal
silence of the heavens
was all a hoax.
How can I tell him
he’s wrong. That death
is one theory of celestial
movement. And there
is no other. That what
we see in the sky
are ghost images:
the moon a blank
mirror, the galaxy
an open wound,
the universe a thin
veil of dust hiding
the empty mind of God.
I only know what
I know. How the universe
looks the same in every
direction. Layered petals
of rose or bleeding
womb. I only know
this night in late
January, sub-zero
temperatures, his
father positioning
a telescope in the frozen
snow of the backyard.
As if he could count
the endless blur of stars.
Imagining the faces
of everyone he’s ever
loved who has died.
from her most recent book, Talking Diamonds, published by New Issues Press in 2009
