I love how, at summer’s end,
treetops drift away,
the sun wears a broader crown,
light is softer on your eyes,
you see an eagle
in the vastness of the sky.

Your skin also changes clothes,
adjusting to cooler nights,
in which you dream in solstice hours
and sleep a longer dream.

Gold and purple frame the end of summer,
like goldenrod and chicory
growing together,

swallowtails drifting over thistles.

The end of summer
is as big as the moon
over a harvested field.

It’s as small as the old couple,
walking in the distance,
ever more insubstantial.

Inside, arrows to psychiatric care
led me down three corridors
only to end at the amputee desk.
I turned back and headed for reception.
“Oh no,” the person said, “second floor.”

I took the elevator to the second floor
and walked around it twice, seeing no one,
as if I were on a floor that didn’t exist.
Finally, I saw another person.
“I’m looking for psychiatry,” I asked.
“Oh no,” the person said, “third floor.”

I went back to the elevator
and pressed the button for the third floor.
When the doors opened,
I was upside down in the elevator.

Cicadas cut down the tree of summer.
Leaves haven’t turned, yet the odd one falls from nowhere.
The white bone of the sky begins to emerge from clouds.
That chirring — all those dead poets
at the core of summer — work transformations.
They sing themselves utterly away,
reminding us we are at war with time.

Sixty-six summers chop at the trunk of memory,
reduce the sun to a stump, truth to bone.
There were days in the forest
when cicadas soaked the wind over stone,
and between the lake and their shrill voices
you drowned beneath the weight of both,
unaware you were only half alive.

I have always failed well — that comforts me.
Cicadas in the tree of summer,
your sounds, your songs,
have long eluded me. Denied their perpetuity,
I still try to add my own songs
to the dying tree of my life,
gathering golden grains from the good hours
to nourish myself at the roots of absence.

The blue beaker of sky in your hand,
drink it down, savour it,
swish it around until you can sing arias,
swim in the spaces of song,
open the spigot and pour another,
share it with your friends,
wash your face with it,
bathe in a bath of blue,
rinse all the meanness from your hair
until it shines with morning light,
soak your feet and fly,
play in the sprinkler,
immerse yourself everywhere,
laugh in a blue rain,
dive into everyone’s pool!

“The diamond is the cornerstone of the wise, proof against the blows of fate.”
(Anonymous alchemical text, c. 1600)

Is something good to come or something amiss?
I pick the card up from the woodland path
and stand in the shadows of the trees
holding a playing card like a bemused polymath.
Why here, now, out of fifty-one companions,
does this small sign arrive in my hand?
And as I studied the diamonds in their mine
the ground beneath me changed—
paving stones as in an old church,
a choir filling the air with unbroken sound.
I knew then, in that crossing of worlds,
I had stepped onto my cornerstone;
nothing in our strange lives is mere incidence.
I lift my door card, four of diamonds,
and place my bet on the given and the unknown.

An immature Red-Tail Hawk
magnificent in its rawness
lands in my backyard,
from brown to white to cinnamon-red,
fierce as a Harpy Eagle,
between myth and reality,
youth and adulthood,
its exuberance and power
on the precipice of flight,
wingspan casting a shadow
and the earth falling back.

I was lucky to have visited the Bar Mazzara,
in Palermo, Sicily. The year was 1995,
and because I loved Lampedusa
my cousin brought me to the Prince’s favourite bar.
There, I reached through the glass.
I touched an older world, the coffee like a vapour
that woke me to a dream that was real.

The bar closed in 2014, bought by a conglomerate.
Like anything in time, everything must change,
even the Bar Mazzara, the Lair of the Leopard,
at which Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
would sit, write, and sip his espressos,
trying to hold time in a porcelain cup,
even though in literature or in business,
loss alone is the constant clause in any contract.

Put out a hummingbird feeder,
become a gardener of the air.
One day a flower will bloom—
a hummingbird flower
made up of different species,
so alive it must vanish quickly,
though for a moment it hovers,
glimmers—
an iridescent flower of the heavens
piercing disbelief itself.

Too Hot To Handle

“Those are gunshots,” Len said,
pouring me another bourbon.
“How often do you hear them?”
“In New Orleans, every week.”
“How’s your bourbon?”
“Good,” I said.

A bullet pierced the window
and shattered my glass—
like a line of poetry
straight to the heart.

“That’s a good line,” Len said.
We both chuckled.
A few more shots rang out.
We went back to watching
an old Jayne Mansfield film,
Too Hot To Handle.

Assault on Silence

Outside Detroit’s Orchestra Hall
I had a smoke and chatted
with the security guard
when gunfire erupted.

“Those aren’t musical instruments,”
he said. They were getting closer—
like a drive-by staged
on a rolling film set.

We stepped back inside.
The orchestra had fired
round after round
until out of ammunition.

A dead audience,
still in bloody clothes,
stood to applaud
this assault on silence.

This hour, this moment, this now.
This summer day framed by my window,
it is irreflexive, it stands by itself,
a singular instead of dual object
in the fields of green mathematics.
It is the stillness of time rooted in trees,
time at the green tip of its leaves,
an aura around its summer flowers,
and every flying, singing thing.
This now, this moment, this hour,
resemblance now strangely altered,
though nothing has changed.