Ice Music

        for Roger

The used bookshop’s cat has died
Exactly where the dust of time decides.
Alfred sat among the books in silence
Like the living presence of the past tense.
Always in tuxedo, he was mysterious
As Max Beckmann, and as serious.
A collector of voices and browsing faces
He was his own book of thoughtful places.
Goodbye, sweet tiger of the stacks.
Life is fiction and books are cats.

The yellow haze of autumn
falls across the field.
All the grass tips are touched
with dabs of Paris green.

Together in the wind
they are the brushstrokes
for this canvas of a golden hour
and spill over the horizon
like the harvest of tomorrow.

What’s barbershop banter without some politics
But the old customer with early onset dementia
Kept changing the subject and we played along
Swept up in the confusion of his memory
And for a short time gas prices were way down
Building was booming
Children played in the streets without fear
People respected one another
And humankind had just landed on the moon

Between water and light,
stillness and waves,
along the fringes of the water,
tracing the line of my origins
to the origins of the end.
I pick up a shell, a feather,
and look out over the lake.
For a moment I’m at the edge,
a living fossil,
my reflection on water
my shadow on land.

By now, I’d expect to be buried
in sleepless nights.
For me the slightest thing
keeps me from sleep—food,
a shift in temperature,
of course, worry and anxiety.

I rise to a grey window
to see what’s really always there,
the vigilance of nature
stirring through the trees.

Then I think
sleep is the anomaly,
what we do dawn to dusk,
live a waking dream,
while only death,
like nature,
is wakeful and alive.

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.