The wind, tonight, like the roar of the waves

The wind, tonight, like the roar of the waves, the

waves white-capped by the moon. The creak of the

pines, their sway as if in a dream of

limbering up their roots and timbering

ships: as if they dream, to a tree, of

wanting to fall, that clasp of brackish

water about their curving forms, the

viscous slip together of their own sticky

saps with blackening pitch. But the ragged

canyon below is only tricklingly

streamed, and the valley beyond has long since

watched, in the light of countless rising

suns, its steaming waters recede, in-

deed forgotten the march, as if in

search of the suns' last place of sleep, of

staunch and prizing glaciers. The rocks sink

low to the hill and ballast the creaking

trees. The wind drops brown and verdant

needles on mosses of impossibly soft sea-

green, a soft and unmoving sea-foam. These

colors, tonight, like the white just edging the

darkening craters of the moon: this windswept

life like nothing so much as the light on the

airless surface of the moon.

(Begun 18 January 2012, edited 24 January 2012, "in the kind of chill that the working brain / foolishly thinks it can evade by keeping still." I tried to evoke the sort of sense-perceptual experience of a place that, repeated over years, becomes infused with the feeling of time passing: the particular experience of the place seeming to capture both the surprise and the familiarity of 'it all'. With shades, probably, of some of the 20th- and 21st-century British fiction I read over the winter.)

A natural light through the leaves

Because of formatting, this poem is available for download as a two-page .pdf here.

Three mountain songs

1. There is empty, where a mountain used to be

and there is only the sound, as up from a well,

of people, a hole in the passive ground,

in the massive earth: a hole in the impassive

earth--they are echoing forth, in the light

like a plastered wall, they are thick like branching

cracks, as a house: it settles over time,

in seasons of chill and slackening heat,

and we their spiraling leaves.

They shake in the light, and we--with a mind

to speak like a child will sparkle its voice

through the vanes of a fan, such an enervating hum,

because he feels that all is not as

it is said to seem to sound, as if

electricity will never give out--

he touched a coin to a socket, and the burn

flat black, a spark and scorched new kitchen

veneer--as if the body will never

give out in the mind, lie down in the light

that is clear and is like no fire.

And there is empty, where people used to be,

and trees that were never blown down or away:

there is only the shadow, and only the things

that shine.

As a mountain must one day go, and in

the hollow, the moss, its ply and drunken

sapling green, its strong and watery being.

All this a memory of seeing.

And the loss, sky-black, below.

2. In the mountains, there you feel free

if your living is elsewhere, but your living is there

and not for so long that the height has flattened out,

but later, for any earlier insight

is a terrible perversion, monstrous, prodigious,

like a stillness resolved--it is the aversion

of the fixated eye, looking at and looking out--

into a choice, and the product of a choice:

a child who is surely alive, although

his heart is stillborn, a rouged and brazen

body box, skin fresh, for the ash made gummy

and molded like modeling putty.

The bodies are plump and soft; his heart

is made to pump blood, and when he breathes,

there is a sound like leaves that, dead, still rattle

over the asphalt like tin.

But in the mountains, you may wish for him to die

and, laying him out for animals, on the moss,

sky-black, to find, you may prefer to say why.

3. Not quite all around the mountain, the road,

and on it leaves, a rattle like tin

that is not elemental but machined of the earth,

filled once with a fluid of vegetables, salted,

machined of the clear-cut mountaintop, ziggurat-

truncated flat, or meat for the man

or woman who is tired all day to reheat--

as well as all night--and eat until 'deeply' and,

however impossibly, 'filled':

The impossibility being that oceanic

feeling when one, whether man or woman,

is the shore and the other--or child--becalmed:

when the land has locked the people under and in.

And something warmed over.

There is empty, where a glacier used to be,

its great indifference to the living--in passing

tones they hiss like steam, their swift

and inaudible being, their groans--and its glide

like window-glass over time to the bottom

of the frame.

How many more hammerings flat or

thin? How many more leaves that sound

like tin, and are heard--so rarely are they gold--

in the stillness that holds, on the surface, between
two sky-black waves of the sea?

(Edited 28 August 2011, begun 18 August 2011. These three together draw for their central image on Wang Wei's "Lu Zhai", a poem that does wonderfully much more than it says, and for their central theme, if there is one, on Plato's suggestion--more haunting when removed from the context of his elaborated metaphysics--that we may remember more than we have experienced. With thanks to students and colleagues in the Language & Thinking program at Bard College.)

A setting of "Getful of apple"

I'm honored to note that "Getful of apple" has recently been set for mixed chorus. A recording of the first live performance may be found here. The composer is Kari Francis, vocal percussionist for Musae, known from such videos as this.

The look that a woman or girl

The look that a woman or girl reserves

for a prettier woman or girl. It is

in part resentful, in part--her darting

eyes--full of pity and need, of a glancing

feeling of sympathy pains at pinched

toes, at arms and shoulders exposed

to the prickling air, of flush at pluck

of hair (her eyebrows and who knows?).

The one--as they say, as she may have been told--

is mousy and must seem dutiful: merely

dressed, not adorned, and dully colored,

she is used to standing out only when not so many

others are around. The other is strawberry

blonde and hungrily thin; she is clothed

much closer in, and shows much more

of her pale and prickling skin. She does not

wobble on her heels, however improbably

high. But she is not less dutiful.

The one is looking; the other is listening

in, to the thinned and darkened voice

of an older woman nearby: she used

to smoke, and still she wishes to smolder,

with makeup stark and clear. But it is

not bright: like her eyes--well past resentful--

and the heatworn russet of her hair, the color

of heatwoven corn. (And if you husked:

the stretched and restitched skin that barely

covers the skull, the cottony tufts

of the will, desire worn thin, rewashed,

and worn again.) The look that a woman

or girl reserves at what she feels is the end.

(Begun 28 April 2011, edited 2 May 2011. From life or what has been made, not asked, to pass for it.)

These period pieces

Because of formatting, this poem is available as a two-page .pdf dowloadable here.

His eyes are amber and slate

At the next table over, a man. He is small

of jaw; some might go further--I think

too far--and say "like a rat or a mouse."

But no. He is too lean and upright

and, in his delicately quarried eyes,

too deliberate and attentive: he is too bright.

It is true that, when he smiles--as often--

or laughs, although little sound comes out,

he shows a great many yellowed teeth. But we

should see how rarely he blinks, and each time

dares to think how bright and upright

is the woman across the table, his daughter: 

he couldn't be prouder or--what amounts

to the same--more relieved. The feeling is plain

in the granite-in-rainfallen grey of his eyes.

He is clearly surprised at having raised her.

He blinks and, thinking back, he wonders

what it would have been to have been raised

by a woman who … --he blinks-- or had

the strength --and thinks, despite that radiant

glow, of a woman bent over below

fluorescent lights, a linoleum kitchen

in colorless white and green, a white

that can never come clean, be it scoured, the bruised

and reddening silence--no sound is allowed

to come out--the desperate acceptance and over-

exposure to slams of cupboards and drawers

--he blinks-- the flatware rattled, the occasional

shattering glass --he thinks-- of feverish

polish and impossibility of shine.

His eyes are amber and slate --he thinks,

somehow it is not too late-- and the sun

through passing clouds --he has saved, if not

his mother, then another young woman after all this time.

(Edited and begun 10 April 2011; directly inspired by a vision, 9 April, of a patron at the local coffee shop; indirectly inspired--already envisioned--by the bright but clouded natural light, and its effects on the skin of tablemates, at meal 3 April. Many thanks to the visible and otherwise perceptible beauty, so deeply lived-in, of all involved.)