It didn’t seem that windy
but the lake showed otherwise–
from inside the car
it appeared to boil,
a silent roil, a shaken
-out sheet.
Now here
I hear the wind,
but can’t see it
whip the trees,
everything’s
coming in
in pieces,
seems like
it’s coming apart
at the seams.
The note said NOTE:
this patient is deceased.
Not a surprise, except again
for how fast things happen,
and how that fastness
is exaggerated by stasis
before, and I swear
time is not entirely linear,
more like swimming
in a river, with depth
and width and current
to account for,
running dry or out
to the ocean
where all water
comes from,
into breath then
into air–
it’s a cycle,
it’s conserved,
and this midday rain
is just a lot
of small
returnings.
This morning’s out of spoons,
as I didn’t start the dishes,
the lump of laundry
a culpable presence–
I can hear geese squawk
as they fly overhead, late,
a less mundane reminder
that time flies too fast,
even on self-indulgently
dull mornings.
The house is so quiet,
I can almost hear the dread
of tomorrow, outsized,
and mostly undeserved.
Every clear day here I marvel
at how open things are–
there’s a clarity in Winter.
Or, less distractions,
and so at night the walls
come in closer
and closer; I drink a little
to breathe and think
in three days, I’ll be
halfway through
the mountains,
the best cure I know
for claustrophobia
masked by the onus
of responsibility–
to flat-out flee,
to get gone as a white-tail
swallowed by trees
and the silence of
accumulating snow.
Hazards on, I parked
in the alley by the stairs
to drop off a friend,
had taken out the carseat
no sooner than a Wrangler
pulled up to park
in the covered spot
opposite, and couldn’t make
the turn
but tried with angry angles,
revving, reversals—
I left her at the elevator,
rushed out,
ready with a quip,
a jokey treatise
on chance
and inopportune
timing, but the driver
cut me short with
You see that red line?
drawing one himself,
so I filled in my side
with look at this rain
and did you see that baby?
—I don’t care
if you have ten of them,
do you see that red line,
so then I turned my back,
so well-inured to, so weary
of this sort of shilling
that I almost missed
his conclusion, there’s no
sign there, they cannot
ticket you, so don’t worry—
I met his gaze, watched
him wave down
placating palms in the same
way one does to calm
an angered animal, or child,
and in his soft accent he said
you didn’t inconvenience me,
look, I parked, it’s fine—
and I made a few mumbled sounds
of thanks and drove off fast,
surprised that I was crying.
The discrete return
of the three AM bird–
coming earlier
in winter, at midnight
a half-dreamed
robin-like call,
or all-dreamed
but half-awake,
bright against
the grainy dark,
a summer call,
the kind you hear
when mornings
dawn cool in the face
of all the day’s heat,
another tell,
as now days
are frozen
and the nights
are even colder.
Dear Keats,
Would you agree
that poetry
is basically an art
in the same vein
as bone-setting?
You set your fair share
of fractures, should know
that healing
is an unruly thing,
as we make a suggestion
and wait and see
what grows
around it,
or often more like read
between the lines—
Sometimes the course
of care is as inevitable
as a river near
its outlet, say
tuberculosis, once?
I know you know this.
I wonder what you’d think
of how the ICU chimes—
I don’t know what half
the sounds mean, yet,
still getting lost in the way
the whole floor moves
beautifully if often
futilely, code blues,
elevator overrides,
living things so hard
to mend, and loathe
to last, words
still our best
and only real palliative.
The weather report: Clouded
judgments, with a chance
of rain tonight–
Down the bank, a diagonal
line of limbs wholly traverses
the blank sky, but
in reality the trees
are twenty feet apart
it’s illusion that they touch–
convincing, as distance
makes us two-dimensional,
hence post-card memories,
hence the flat aspect of doubt.
Gray plumes stretch
from the hospital incinerator.
A bald eagle perches
above the floating bridge.
Also facing due South,
but still in final descent, a 747–
Delta, by the chevrons on its tail.
This rare dry air
shows such precise detail;
would that my thoughts were
so clear, or even
clear as your intentions,
but they aren’t,
and especially not to me.
Hot air expands
cold air contracts,
but this cold snap has
resembled the opposite.
There’s so much space,
now, for the sky to fill–
it pools over the lake
at sunset, over-saturated,
splits the bare tree branches
like a fine-toothed comb.
Nothing about this suggests
recession, even the early nights
wait a little longer, gently
sloping into dusks
of pin-prick stars.
The moon
through the woods
spills rolling shadows,
making an ocean floor
out of the yard,
the freezing point fixing
the landscape
in unusual ways–
smoke rising ceaselessly,
dry evergreens plumb,
all humidity gone
except for the frost
that plates the world
at dawn, the benevolent
glove it now wears.
OPTIONAL POETRY 