There’s one piano note my daughter plays
it’s like a pearl has appeared in the room
quasi niente like sunshine on water
ineffably tender like a white rose at the limit of its stem
a snowflake forming the keys of its crystal
a moonlit seashell butterfly instant and dove of light
a soundless note that absorbs all other notes
and like an afterimage
rings with the absence which it struck
Fall Notes
The beat of a train
At the crossroads of rain
Trucks on the street
And wiping of feet
The rasping of leaves
And patter of eaves
With leaf blowers
Offensive to the last flowers
And avian overtures
Announcing departures
Autumnal music
Turns inwardly magic
It fades from the forest
Like flowers from a florist
It creaks like a door
And falls through the floor
The descent is unkind
To the shelter of the mind
With accelerated sawing
The rot is gnawing
With tree shredders
Like men of letters
Outside our windows
Drift reds and yellows
Apples percussing
A quieter sussing
With more and more blue
Fruiting into view
More and more space
Attending the race
And late-night squalls
Pushing pianos over walls
Labor Day Weekend
The dying light is ever the same,
Borrowing the last hour of summer
And giving it a date and name,
Matching it with familiar shadows,
Or returning with rain showers
The resonance of last year’s rain.
In this neighborhood and others
Families come together
With one less leaf on their tree
And one less place at their table
And change goes unnoticed
Like a waterglass handed to a child,
No sooner the moment offered
Its own transparency vanishes.
Mirror Stages
4
A barber cutting hair in a mirror
Lets the hair fall from scissors
Out of the mirror’s frame
Into the river of time.
The seamstress measuring
A length of reflection
Before marking with chalk
The material of the immaterial.
Night traffic in a mirror
Like a city photograph
That melts its neon
Over the raining light.
A mirror that shows flowers.
A door that opens without opening,
And lightning in rain showers
With thunder infolding.
3
The saddest rake in the world,
Raking leaves in a mirror
As though it danced alone.
The most invisible point,
Lovers looking at each other
For the last time in a mirror.
Tables, curtains, paintings
And other unintended interiors
Are parts of the sum of mirrors.
The wind blowing in a mirror
Equals the weight of time
That goes unnoticed.
The coldest mirrors melted,
Drowning the stars
And flooding the earth.
2
The longest rains
Fall in the country of mirrors.
The shortest day was recorded
In the almanac of mirrors.
Time so infinitesimal it is stopped
By a mirror like a hummingbird heart.
Music and mirrors are such intimates
Degas painted a mirror of dance.
1
All the violence and not even a ripple across the surface.
The mirror left an immaculate oval on the wall.
Mirrors and clocks: machines that have agreed not to merge.
Monet’s waterlilies– a mirror in water.
Mirrors in mirrors, the music of loss reflected in love.
An American Prayer
America, my friend and neighbor,
Reopening the wounds of Christ,
The scar under the scar that never heals,
The festering of your own infection,
An inflammation inflamed.
Clearly, you’re the hate behind hate,
Masklessness masking your mask
Of pride and vulnerability,
With a burn under your burn,
With darkness in your darkness
And falsehoods covering falsehoods…
America, who among you
Can see and say the whole truth?
Who will cross the racial divide?
Who will be the dove of light?
Who will carry the olive branch
Into the battleground of your own streets?
The Trace of Desire
Sometimes I still see a trace of desire,
How she looked at me when we met.
The years bury that trace in acquaintance
But there once remains a prospect,
Even beyond the childcare years,
Well into adulthood, from time to time,
The trace of desire pauses between us
Like a dragonfly on the tip of a stem.
Now that we approach old age together
I wonder how long desire will last,
Beyond beds owned and sleep lost,
This lingering, fraying tether.
En Plein Air
The lily pads touch the earth
Of their own dreams
A dragonfly threads my sight
Through the border reeds
The light on marsh water
Is like the sun in flower
The flowering light
Is like the marsh on fire
Now with the treeline
Sinking like a boat
At the bottom of night
The moon begins to float
Nature Revisited
A deer family plunging across rapids
In a drama intensified by a storm surge
Osprey awash in spray
Of wings and prey
A peregrine racing a coastline
At sunset the wildflowers
Gather their own bunches of light
Wood ducks
Splash into a forest pond
One announcement of birth after another
A gar pike
Ancient as the river
Alive as it is dead
A fox snake
Like a twisting fire
Burning out in the grass
Orchard orioles
Round out the ripening
Childhood Revisited
For orange jewelweed one flower
Is still a flowering plant
The youngest deer of the forest
Hear everything
With the transparent leaves of their senses
A red-spotted purple
Flies away with the sky
A paper wasp barely moves
The leaf on which it lands
A dead branch bursts
Into decaying life
Green frogs stretch
The gulp of their voices
Across the stream
Ferns brush themselves
Into the undergrowth
In nature the children
Of our shadows
Remember us as we were
Animal Death Mass
The sun in the shape of starfish
The last wings raining down hard
Dolphins diving into breathlessness
Mass graves for fish and pigs
Mixed with cattle and their kind
The last bees in the carcass of a lion
Dead turtles mute the thunder
Elephantine absences push space
Closer our own extinction
Bats fall from the sky over Israel
Like prophecies gutted by time
Whales breach the surface of being
And like the earth washed ashore
On its own dead coastlines
Our faith in things unseen
Numbers us among the damned
