from WILDERNESS (2000)

TWO BOYS 

 

 

I never met the boy who drowned.  

He lived in the next block, another, a distant tribe.  

But kids I knew were there  

and said he flew on his sled as if no weight at all caught  

in the winter wind  

blowing him high off the lip of the lathered cliff of ice, 

telling how he hung in the air  

like he and his sled were one for a few miraculous flying seconds . . .  

 

I’d been on an ice flow  

for years, drifting through my own weird circadian rhythms, 

so I knew how the boy felt, 

how he imagined, and even saw,  

while flying or sinking,  

the robin hop and turn its head over its own shadow on the lawn, 

while nearby leaves crinkled as a blue racer  

poured itself down a small hill.  

Then suddenly it was really winter.  

At the peak of his flight it seemed the snow that had been falling  

clung to him like magnetized insects huddling for warmth.  

 

* 

 

Blocks of ice float in Lake Michigan,  

knock together like manatees bumping heads.  

 

Overnight the dead put away their welding torches.  

 

The giant slabs  

ride one another over the sea-colored water,  

which licks and licks  

the edges smooth,  

wave after lapidary wave polishing the past  

to obsidian . . . 

 

* 

 

 

 

 

Snow is warm.  

My mother finally believed so after years of pain  

and she died smiling curled on her bed  

while her room grew small and dark. “It was like thunder  

or a deep voice. God  

makes an enormous clattering when he lets slip  

a little breath inside the retina, 

a flake, and then the trees are covered.  

And a light the color of honey swings through the glass 

to transport you.” She was talking  

about a snowplow.  

 

I’ve fallen through ice before, and came up freshly breathing  

two blocks downstream  

after having arrived escorted by something like pilot fish.  

I think they were walleyes, 

barred and rough-scaled,  

rubbing my arms with their soft dorsals, 

nibbling my fingers with their diamond teeth.  

                                                            I walked shedding  

sheets of freezing water  

that broke like panes of glass  

all the way back to my car.  

 

* 

 

I found the boy’s sled. It was wedged into an island of ice  

bobbing in deep water  

like a ship going down. I sailed through the nights  

with a flag of red flannel. I talked  

to my mother for company. She said I shouldn’t be afraid.  

When she died  

a doctor couldn’t figure out how she’d remained limber.  

My father came back to see if what he’d heard was true  

and he picked up my mother  

and she hung limp in his arms like a sleeping girl.  

 

* 

 

The boy sinks, lit up like a comet 

before resting on the sandy floor of the lake.  

His picture in the newspaper grows indistinct  

under lengthening shadows,  

drifts of snow wrapping their arms around the hems  

     of the ice-shagged junipers  

like the beginning of something that never stops ending, 

a breath in the dark,  

wave upon wave of eyes opening, 

the wind and the snow like a song  

we keep hearing,  

how the days of our love are so numbered, 

a few flakes hissing on water,  

                                    another white cross stabbed  

into the frozen sand outside Elks Park,  

the warm laps of our mothers  

who will never die.  

SNOWSTORM WITH THUNDER 

 

 

It was a freak storm, leaves still green on the trees, 

the night of the last game of the ‘97 World Series, 

in which the Marlins beat the Indians, although I had to wait  

to find this out, since the tenuous electronics—the image of Thome  

tapping his cleats with a bat—failed us, everyone in the neigh- 

borhood suddenly filling the streets, coming out of their dark homes  

to investigate what sounded like far-away gun shots, 

the snow laden branches snapping like twigs,  

crashing down into driveways, against eaves.  

Blue sparks popped out of a transformer. A man I’d never met lit a cig.  

“When I woke up from a dead sleep I thought I was in ‘Nam.”  

Slowly, piecemeal, the street filled with wires and leaves. 

I’d been sitting there eating popcorn, when the screen went to a dot.  

Lightning flashed, thunder, a tree crashed down, then calm.  

 

SEPTEMBER  

 

 

For weeks it was too hot to breathe. 

And you couldn’t walk anywhere, or if you did 

even the trees looked sluggish, blue and sticky, 

your skin turning clammy with dirt and sweat.  

 

Then one night the temperature  

dropped into the low forties. 

The moon rang above the television set  

like a snapshot through cold, clear Canadian air, 

and white smoke curlicued out of my neighbor’s  

cinder block chimney  

writing loops before the stars.  

 

I turned off the T.V. and went outside.  

Across the street a big blazing fire crack- 

led in a field of brown grass 

and wild asparagus  

and you could tell by the sounds—laughter, 

a car stereo blasting heavy metal—it was just a bunch of kids  

     drinking  

on a cool end-of-summer evening, a final blow  

before school, 

                        and every once in a while  

a cheer would rise out of the crowd, 

and the flames would suddenly roar to life  

causing the bordering woods  

to glow a shade of neon green, the trees looking stuck up there 

like huge cut-outs.