Aspen leaves flip and flash
waking the glass-covered wall behind;
dark when my mind pauses,
bright when my mind stirs.
What is genuine, true? Tell me,
when you flip and flash
and the wall behind you holds
its light like a mountain on fire?
My mind is ignored, perhaps
except for this one aspen
that kindly flips and flashes
and wanders along with me
persuades the wall behind it
to concede, bend,
forget the mountains,
use the fire as I will.
how it is our first and final loss
how it is always here and not here
how the way I dress for work preserves it,
letting the things of girlhood fall away
how you forgot why you were excited to get up
by the time you poured your coffee
how you ambled back into the house
with buds of phlox sticking to your shirt
how the weekend is a baptism in it
how it is the in-between that persuades us all
to tolerate the sound of our own voices
how every religion praises the life of it
how each day is unsummable
because of its endless wanderings
Open spade cleaves mud,
unwraps under-earth’s treasure-trove —
twisted wires of plant roots
clinging deep,
no repentance, no shame.
I ask when will you break free,
leave us alone, untangle this mess?
You grip on, silent as black,
churning in your own direction,
to your own end, to ours.
Late in the afternoon that day,
as the low sun pierced the leaves
like a thousand glimmering stars,
each of my long-dead patients rushed me
towards an unexpected, unearned bliss.
Of course, it seems shallow how memories,
obscured by our endless tasks, doings
of this moment or that, can burst
into our presence and bring us a sort
of forgiveness, lost again to life —
but it is a private, unsharable knowing,
that I pray comes to you some long,
long day, when our bleakness so common
overtakes you; may you learn to learn
this particular kind of absence,
this specific child of failure.
blue jay caws
swell the faraway echo,
drawing us near
our sandy bluff — breezes wrap,
spin us round, return us round
I am not sure if it is the breeze,
wilder, more freeing than any in the city,
or the wintergreen sending its scent
up to play with the blueberries and pine
that brings on this longing afresh.
You would perch yourself on a ridge
like this one overlooking the lake
or a forested horizon, endless to me,
and explain how the horses would trail
over the opposite ridge or
how they used to graze in the pasture
beyond that overgrown farm field,
how you’d camp between those two trees
when you were twelve, or on the beach.
Even though this is a different woods,
new to you, I am somehow certain
you would have such stories to tell.
You’d pause to take in the air, deep
and daydreamy, with your easy
swing of a step that said
you were not in the city, no, not today.
You’d skim your hand over the leaves
and look to the sky to tell me the time.
Poems from in between 