Each leaf: a bright jewel, a hot coal
If orchards, they are ripe
If celebrations, brief
Two weathered ones are mottled
brown and green
They are broad wings gliding down
the hanging scroll
Hawks on a thermal
Soon we will sit by the window and watch
blue shadows
lengthen along the snowy fields
When he knew he was dying, he gestured
into the sky, his voice
a hoarse brushwork, wistful
I have always worked hard—why?
One day I will not wake in my body as you know it
or go from the bed to the open
door to breathe in the fresh glory of the morning.
Although you will not see me, by afternoon I will be
wind, unfenced in the expanse
between towering clouds of oyster and plum air.
I will be in the oak, in the ivy, in the spillway
and banks thick with iris,
yellow-eyed and blue, and in the tannic and bittersweet
silk of the pond over which clouds pause and reflect
before shattering the surface.
I will be in the rain, in the stone, in the root, in the fruits
of the garden. You will take me into your mouth
(as so often you have)
and we will be one body of solitudes and barrens and wilds.
We will be mountain and cirrus, salamander, owl in the dark
husk of winter, a crescendo
of cicadas in summer. We will fly in a flash of green light
over fields taking shape in the early morning mists. Here,
always here. So close, there is
nothing more I can tell you than what we already know.
(an excerpt)
Snow thickly falls through the trees on the knoll
as I watch her, motionless on a gnarled
branch of oak. Wings folded, patched white
as flake by flake she becomes a soft burl
of snow. Wind erases my footprints.
My mother’s last breath—did I inhale it?
Indigenous, I begin. Presence, I pray—
stopped by the sharp swivel of a beaked gaze
that unlocks me, just long enough that my
eyes go yellow and wind ruffles the shawl
of feathers my neck now is—as the hawk
turns and lifts into the Undivided.
Now who is it bows to the empty branch?
An art, not a right, happiness,
according to the Dalai Lama
(David reads aloud to me)
is not as elused
as one might think, but clozer
and grisp. I wonder
if his screwing up
how words are said is prologue
to a deeper detour in the neuronal relays . . .
or is it faulty eyesight
as he speeds over the lines
if small print?
Now he looks out the window
at a steady drizzle.
He smiles and calls it
“the seep and slur of rain.”
He enjoys
punching out the stressed
syllables as he returns
to reading—
a measure of personal
happiness—happiness
our purpose in life,
not selfish as one might suppose,
although the wish to avoid
unhappiness
may be. And I remember
a friend’s sad report:
“He put his urine-soaked
underpants on my face
one night as I slept.”
She told me this serenely,
as if the experience
she had with her husband’s
dementia would be mine, there
was no stopping it. I said nothing,
only fixed my mind
on the remembered smell
of David’s skin—something like
saffron married to a whiff of ripe
pears and worn-out
cotton undershirts. Blindfolded,
I could distinguish David
and find him in a crowd of men,
were I allowed to snuffle
each man’s neck and smell
the difference—
and that thought gave me
happiness
as unexpected as was the glimpse of the road
that moved beneath us
as we sped home on a morning
long ago, after
a night of reading each other’s
poems aloud, every
blessed one of them,
the road beneath us seen through the rotting-out
porous floor
of the old jeep
as we traveled at the
speed of light,
and nothing, nothing
could slow us down
or keep us
separate from each other
or the road, wherever it took us.
Always an immigrant
the heart
crosses borders
and boundaries
it trespasses
it will not be held back
Windswept, sea-swept
star-swept
it is poor, porous
permeable
it is outcry and
prayer
and a murmur
that ends with
a question mark
Tell me, is it
inside you
the immigrant heart? Or are you
inside it?
I only know
it contains multitudes
this heart
whose color
is not
red or black, or brown
or yellow, or
white—
the immigrant
heart is
transparent
there is a light inside it, it fuels
galaxies
nurses a child
holds your beloved
as he sinks over
his last threshold
a thread of gold light
just visible
along the border
of his body
Just look, the immigrant
heart
races naked along the tide line
kisses
both bandage and wound
holds a cup
to the mouth that thirsts
and the cup runneth over
it leaps with the suicide
into the waterfall river
carries school books
and ladders
and songs
it translates
the law, and transforms it
this heart
in the heart of the world
brings the children out of
cages, crates
and sealed truck-beds
What is it, you ask, What is
this immigrant
heart
if not sweat
if not nectar
if not salt
if not aloe
if not what the sages
have promised, the sages
in their desert hovels
and prison cells
the sages on the street corners
and in the subway
turnstiles
They know how the immigrant
heart
gives from its own boundless
mercy
and light, crossing into
beatitude
and bliss, into pain
and rejection
this heart a new life always arriving
your body, my body
one body in the makeshift shelters
we call our lives
Not Hearing the Wood Thrush, “Passage”
Once in sunlight I pinned to the clothesline a cotton sheet, a plane of light
sheer as the mind of God,
before we imagined that mind creased by a single word.
With my hand I smoothed any rivel, any shirr, any suggestion of pleat or furrow.
Whatever it was I wanted from that moment, I can’t say. It failed to edify.
Nor did I bow.
And yet the memory holds, and there is a joy that recurs in me much as the scent
of summer abides in air dried sheets I unfold long after,
lying down in them as one might in a meadow,
as one might with a lover, as one might court the Infinite, however long it takes.