from ARROW POINTING NORTH (2002)

STARLIGHT

 

 

All day long smoke drifted through the lilacs

and the idea of that was so beautiful

I wasn’t surprised when some of my neighbors

came out of their houses and wandered

through the woods, looking for something.

That night over Brandywine Lake

the full moon froze the silhouettes

of geese flying north and the smell

of dying flowers wafted through the screens.

It was as if one might live forever, seeing these things,

feeling them flow, one into another,

like the river of bees that streamed all summer long

out a knothole in the side of the house,

comets blown through a black hole, or like miniature

aircraft, dispersed among the trunks of trees

eventually to be lost in the darkness of nightfall.

 

 

 

 

 

INSIDE/OUTSIDE

 

 

You see the lake now, as every morning,

driving to work, the way it just lies there, under ice,

under the zagging shadows of trees without leaves,

some of the boathouse doors

 

askew from a winter’s battering, but somebody’s

boathouse, white, for instance, brown trim like a little

home. Like your home, your love,

 

your circular dreams, your present idea-of-self,

your lake-full-of-fish self, a body of water only a mile from end to end

and round as a full moon,

the big paper circle propped in the street you accidentally drive

 

your car through,

everyone cheering, but the paper is ice and the ice

becomes a blizzard

 

with a hole in its corner,

and your family, they love you, only their love is in slow-

motion and no one’s aware of the thick carp glancing off your

     windshield.

Every morning you walk out the door

 

with your lunch in a sack.

It’s nothing like a painting, although sometimes your wife

draws the face of a laughing rabbit on the brown paper

 

while you’re upstairs dressing.

Door, lake, boathouse, stoplight, first cigarette.

Long streams of snow blowing off your roof like a wake.

Big paper bag with a drawing of a rabbit on it

 

you hit going fifty.

 

 

 

 

 

I WANT TO BE BURIED

 

 

When it’s time, I want to be buried under a river,

so that eventually my bones become

a place for fish to hide, small ones, like the dull

fathead minnow or maybe a creek chub, plain

as a white piece of paper.

I would like to be structure, instead of a headstone.

It might take a hundred—maybe a thousand—years

but I want to be buried deep under the current

of some hurtling stream of water

so eventually a crayfish, if he feels like it, can climb up a rib

once in a while, oversized claw in tow,

to just look around or wave good-bye to his friend.

Sticklebacks, water boatmen, mud puppies

could all find refuge in my eye sockets

in the event someone larger—say, a steelhead—goes hunting.

I would like to be structure

for pike, visiting from warm water estuaries,

my hip like a bottle opener for prying

out treble hooks. All winter long I’d be surrounded

by pines heavy with snow, a few ice-capped logs sporting

what look like helmets,

an occasional crow crossing overhead,

a piece of somebody’s lost shadow.

 

 

 

 

TALKING ABOUT SNOW ALL NIGHT 

 

 

1. 

He kissed them, before rubbing snow on the arms  

Of the girls  

Who’d come back crying  

From the lake where they’d been lost on the ice.  

Nobody froze or drowned. 

Flakes like dust rolled by in a wave, 

Blinding them, 

And the snow refused to lie down. 

That’s how they almost froze, 

 

With skates on their feet. 

When he eased their cold fingers out of their gloves  

He thought of birds being born.  

 

 

2.  

But it’s almost summer now. 

The piles of snow shrink back over the dirt  

And grass. 

                    Soon people are leaving cordless phones  

On porch railings.  

A woman does so so she can walk across the street  

And sleep beneath  

A row of blossoming dogwoods. 

And the voice on the other end of the line  

Grows smaller and smaller 

Until there is nothing left but a fly  

Bumping in lazy circles  

Against the dusty garage door’s windows.  

 

 

3.  

I once had a dream in which everyone parked  

Their cars  

In a lot the size of Ohio & left them to rust. 

They sat steaming in the fields for months, 

The batteries slowly losing their charges, cooling, 

One by one the dashboards fading, 

 

Until one night late in October— 

He thought he could hear the abandoned cars  

Begin whispering to one another . . .  

 

And it sounded like a light rain falling  

Or like the soughing of waves  

Through an open window  

While you’re trying to sleep  

In a bed  

With a woman who’s been talking about snow all night, 

 

How beautiful it is in the moonlight  

After the city shuts down, 

How it causes the deer to poke their noses through the hedges  

After wandering like children  

Into the suburbs, 

Looking for something they’re not sure they want to find.  

THE OWL LEFT A FEATHER IN THE BUCKET AGAIN

 

 

Love, I saw you once, your handlebars curved against the wind.

I have been sealing many envelopes,

sleeping in corduroy, drinking half & half with a little coffee.

A lantern’s been spotted flying over the lake.

In twenty-two cities the comic strips

leak into the daily news—it’s all a big joke!

Somehow a candle burns in the vacated grocery store.

 

A girl with a vaccination scar

Entered the local bank wanting a loan for a cemetery plot.

Nobody knew her.

Love I saw a priest wandering the aisles of K-mart wearing a pea coat.

He had dreadlocks. He was buying CDs.

Mr. Love, please, I bought pillows for the orphanage,

 

a new bedspread to cover my wife’s menstrual stains.

I watched a man give another man the finger in broad daylight.

 

I’m not alone in this.

The black widows crawl over the tops of mailboxes; ambulances

idle at the end of our road. A red and yellow can

of gasoline appeared in the middle of the football field

last week. It wasn’t an accident. Mr. Love, Dear Love,

the bridge is not safe anymore. The swallows are about to revolt.

 

Quite often they can be seen with something orange in their beaks.

I fear the worst.

An owl left a feather in the bucket again.