Hangs heads
Hardens hearts
Has holocausts
Hinders healing
Humiliates humility
Harasses heroes
Honors hubris
Highjacks humanity
Heeds hogwash
Hatches hoaxes
Harping honesty
Hurling harm
Hastening haemorrhaging
I Live in Her Smile
My wife’s smile is like two apples,
Her smile smiles with courage,
Her eyes smile inside her smile
Like the echo of love between lovers.
My wife’s smile opens Spring windows
Like the flowers for which we wait.
Her smile is the peace of the house
And the sunlight after a storm.
Her smiles elevate me to higher ground.
They are like kisses from afar,
Negative test results for my anxiety,
Poetry awards to prise my heart.
Windows and Mirrors
faces of sad and happy life
lightning in crystal
thunderstorm traps
frost-seed granulations
water at freezing and melting
sunlight through museum panes
the glare of volcanic glass
a bird’s reflection in its shadow
pearl of time in the face of night
last looks at last faces descried
the binding of souls
bridges over limitless waters
view from a window at Le Gras
time driving backwards
mannequin transmissions
the vague “she” of poetry
nakedness dressed in its reflections
sunset in Emma Bovary’s eyes
blue mirrors of Shallot
the soaring of Zeno’s stillness
the flight of the alone
the surgeries of Dr. Glas
the surface of vertical
the spaceless dimension
of duration
buried in glass
flower store windows bare
barbershop empty
travellers on a Greyhound
morning the breath gone
Three Keepers
Rinat Dasayev
Dasayev’s save against Scotland
Off a glancing goal-bound header
In the 1982 World Cup
Was like a release in the fabric of space
And a save I now save, in tribute.
Gordon Banks
How do you save the shadow
Of a bouncing ball?
Raise your hand up to God.
How do you save a moment in time?
You save it forever.
Thomas N’Kono
Le chat noir had to save his team
While saving his race
In Europe’s arenas of racism.
He gave hope that hate could end
A goal worth saving.
Dreamt Barbershop
Passing a barbershop I see my father.
He’s reading his newspaper, as he often did.
He looks trapped by the mirrors
In which he worked, like a living specter.
I ask for a haircut and shave
But my father doesn’t recognize me.
I’ve grown too old to be his son.
As he cuts my hair, I feel the same touch
And his same skill with a razor.
We talk about sports, as we always could.
After the haircut I pay and leave.
I don’t wake the barber from his dream
Or myself, from my own.
Nonna Sewing, Sewing
Since childhood I’ve been unraveling
The spools in nonna’s sewing box
Needles for the handiwork of the moon
Pins for the sky against the sky
Thimbles for the chalice of the invisible
Measuring tapes for night’s endless garment
Scissors for the unseeming of space
Scraps for the patchwork of time
The white thread from the black
And the blue and white threads
She passed through the eye of a needle
Unspooling her own life in shadow
Extra Time
Let’s save the world,
Let’s play the earth into its net of stars,
Let’s put one goal up for humans
And zero for the enemies of time.
All you goalkeepers, let’s save the goal,
Let’s save the earth in its net of stars,
Push asteroids clear of the post
And intercept each crossing moon.
Football fans and players,
Together we can save the earth,
We can pass love through a ball,
Kick ignorance to a lower hell
And play with joy on celestial fields.
Diego Maradona
Who was Maradona?
He didn’t even know.
He kept trying
To be so many things.
He was dervish and dancer,
Panther and pirate,
Magician and juggler,
Monster and deliverer,
Animal and Angel.
Then one day a ball
Hung in the air,
Defying gravity, and he died.
Paolo Rossi
Scored through the eye of a needle,
Into the mouth of a fish
And the fishermen’s nets.
He scored through laundry lines
Like day moons in sunny blue,
And in the memories
Between fathers and sons
He scored into forever.
Father Time
Have the trees lost their leaves
Or am I seeing through my hands?
Have the leaves fallen
Or have I risen from the ground?
Have autumnal abscissions concluded
Or am I like you, deluded?
Have I reached old age
Or everlasting youth?
I don’t know. I don’t know.
Where I’m asked, I’ll go.
So Far Along the Forest Path
The youngest sassafras branches are green, like rose stems.
A broad-winged hawk lands on the hydro tower like one of the gods of voltage.
A cooper’s hawk and kestrel round out the day’s raptures.
Also came across a stand of young honey locust trees, like dancing partners dipping and swaying in the wind.
Along a path of reeds the whispers are like the voices of many lives in parallel universes.
Yesterday I found a dying mantis on the path, with a day moon in one eye.
Fall is falling today like an adagio only I can hear.
As though a Van Gogh of the wind had painted a brush dipped in sunflowers across the forest.
A female cardinal separates her shadow from her shade and turns up in neither.
When a cardinal and a blue jay cross the same path at the same instant, the discernment of truth cuts through the silence of beauty.
“Men are men, but Man is a woman.” Chesterton
Because rivers are women
And mountains are women
And savannahs and jungles
Are women with wild hearts
Because seahorses are women
And caves and seashells
And the wheel of the stars
Because language is a woman
And bread is a woman
And willows and wisdom
Because baskets of shadows are women
And deepest depths
And the moon and sun
With her golden raiment
And forgiveness has no fiercer mother
Or more frightening war cry
Because I know no man born of man
I know only woman
And she who turns the year
