The Dearest Gift

Brother

It’s crowded in there.

From here, outside, I see the obstacles he can’t see out of insurmountable to him, to me his own construction; the hardest kind.

At home he grows in old man pants dark green and brown (plumber’s pants or uncles’) so coarse and long of course for his big frame.

Standing, and when he talks, he is a cradle; nuzzling low words with stooped attention, sweeping thoughts together with the broad inflection of his hand.

My older brother, younger.

And cruel complexion fights the fortress of his face and loses; so fine and handsome the bones’ proportion they cannot hide.

And so the fence that keeps him in.

Good God, you’re guiltless.

Good God he is.

Leave him be or help him.

October 1979

1

Sky I’m talking blue on blue September clouds ultra extra violet, cobalt cruel, mussed and stopping like cluttered dreams tumbling stacked like oily glass blue milk in water budding up to thunder.

September 1979

2

Yellow you took this photo this one of a single yellow bush shaped like your arms‘ biggest heart I’ll tell you why I think you took it the reason is better than beauty this bush is you this photo is conversation look at it a very lovely heart alone thriving on the hope of a blue sky this picture is to carry in your pocket next to the ones of mom and dad and us next to your arms‘ biggest heart.

January 25, 1980

3

Coming home like soldiers breaking step to cross a bridge individuals now, breaking ahead, straying led by moon and slope plodding like pack horses lulled by their own sure cadence blue in the night, vague identified by voice only fingerprint on the wind all thinking, all remembering, all soaking it up piling on the sleds once more holding, hugging, depending laughing all the way down.

January 25, 1980

4

River cat This cat we saw it was on the ice in the middle, right in the middle of the froze river he thumped the crust like hollow bread to sound it down we think he was fishing in kitty heaven crossing the ice like clouds up yonder dreaming of those cold green fishes in that blue dark below.

February 8, 1980

5

Morning Now in the morning before cars stretch down the road or I reach for my socks I look for you.

I find you, face closed and colorless and profiled on the pillow; the seam of your lips smiling in sleep.

Your nostrils are small sculptures, too delicate to work any your hair folds slow and comfortable over your ears and neck onto the pillow where it nestles like a kitchen cat.

One shoulder, exposed to the morning, rises like a scooped moon from swirled afghans radiating heat and white and so I kiss you - good morning.

February 14, 1980

6

Hangers It’s inspirational to know that a weakness can be a strength It’s the kind of thing to make your day - a surprise What made me think of it are those cheap white coat hangers, those useless ones that fold their bones if asked so much as to wear a shirt on their scrawny arms Myself, I just bend them like pipe cleaners and push them down in the trash. My shirt can warm the chair instead.

But those white hangers are good for lots of things just not so good for wearing clothes)!

Why, you can uncork the hook-ed part and have yourself three white feet of good and plenty wire: and you can do a million things with wire; from lacing boots to slicing cheese.

Now if you try it with those black or bronze ones forget it. They are forged rigid as flag poles. oh, they have their strength, their one strength, but those white ones have flexibility, and I know it!

Now I keep a closet of them: bent white scabby ones that clatter when I close the door Who said it? that saying?

“Give me pliers and a hander in hand and I can shape my world.”

March 1980

7

Wallet Lying like a pearl in the sand your closed wallet rests like an overlooked clue silent, enigmatic, black like a hymnal, closed like a locket Oh, but inside I will always remember the tremendous depth, I mean fathoms Cards and notes buried below and below and below I was faint This abyss in my hands was cavernous tags of paper, yellow and white were stacked in one end like doors off their hinges And then that other end a slick black gash for my terror to fall into I heard echoes and footsteps I felt hallways and walls it was the most personal thing It was a diary, a novel, a witness The pages were shutters and vaults I could not read it I was inside looking out or inside looking in or anywhere with my eyes closed The clues were infinite, the secrets secure.

March 26, 1980

8

Two If a crocus is a piccolo like a hyacinth a psalm then the tulip is a trumpeter and the lily is a swan.

Three pretty ponies chestnut, plum, and pink satin in the sunrise sable too, and mink.

Spring, 1980

9

Letter We’re beginning to really know each other and it’s another way to love that we didn’t know before an even more informal way But being less formal brings more to bear on trust on knowing one won’t go too far on the other, a boundary not even in view when we began Now though, we can be closer than ever We can brush against the smallest heart I can bounce it on my knee, but such banter bruises easily such a tiny fruit sustains a wound so quickly I must go gently this close proceeding carefully with the one I love the one who trusts me.

April 1, 1980

10

Old walls old walls will surround us coarse old arms of caked and brittle lath built on good old stock brawny, rough-hewn sturdy sturdy like the bones sturdy like the character of fathers that built them they’ll keep their strength if only from their weight alone timbers, nearly trees, anchored in the walls and wind will blow in winter it will storm around and down the barrel chest of our great hill slicing into the gaps in lath and stop because our coarse old walls, friendly fathers, will wrap us like wool; cursed, blessed wool roughly woven, coarsely cut, but warm.

June 22, 1980

11

Used to be when it crumbles in your hand like little bergs of anchor ice and lands halfway on its way to becoming the soil that it falls to the old barn timbers fall also into memory gone their thick strength flaked away their wholesome whitewash all to detritus and dust leaving only sound sturdy stories of how strength and beauty used to be.

June 24, 1980

12

My story There being so many things to remember of course I forget If I had all of those thoughts before me would I be in their debt?

June 24, 1980

13

Lesson I’ve always accepted the explanation that the algae in our summer river rises with the heat in order to clean the channel a yearly purging On late June mornings when the river eases by with glacial steadiness its surface a poured pane of window glass, pleasantly flawed, small chains of green link along the sloughs and banks wherever the current drags or waits An unpleasant sight to think we swim here too But the river cleans by August clears by noon Only we early risers see the scouring those of us with time to watch a river bathe By afternoon and autumn the place is clean enough and ready for ducks and boats and dreams of leaving.

June 25, 1980

14

Remember this Dan, remember this one.

Remember the foggy morning, the wet white air, the black tree trunks, and the loose black earth under the red live leaves.

Remember it was Sunday, that Linda wore her russet pants and my red coat and her her froppy knitted hat.

And that we woke to walk the hill and visit her fence post.

Remember our boots were dark with dew and remember the corn along the skyline hung under the fog like roots anchoring it to the day.

And I cannot forget our rise into sunshine, our ascension to blue, and yellow, and red.

The sky rose straight up - wide and high and empty; its emptiness made more vast by two skeins of geese which glittered like tinsel.

We saw so much - it was as it always is with you.

Smell that smell, see the fog locked in the valley, hear the corn applaud the day, see those seven birds, those seven little birds flit within the blown-ink branches of the hedge-row brambles.

Hear the peewee or phoebe charm the hillside with its own color and light.

And remember the deer down below, wet as my boots, glistening by the cornstalks.

And remember that the sunlight followed us down and came with us onto the porch and into our home.

October 15, 1980

15

Instant This was fast, very fast It was an instant I reached for the chain in the blackness and in the act of pulling as the light acted I saw as seeing for the first time the way light comes to the eye as it travels I was going to say four-color viscid spots patterned like this paper, but it was so quick Still, I saw it. I realized it But it was fast, it was an instant.

November 1980

16

Taste it You have to know something for this one You have to know jellied spearmint leaves crusty white sugar on the outside and thick with jelly on the inside; jelly of such a state as to leave the tracks of your teeth on the green The day outside; a first snow on the last green, fat-flaked and windy, reminded me Green being smothered in white and yet tastefully green - alive with cool mint Breath in!

Cool green, cold white, jellied day!

November 11, 1980

17

Oasis Always autumn leads me to a leafy road that begs decision Not the road not taken not one less trodden but one that makes me turn and head for home.

Home - to where life’s a plan to build and a keg of nails where water runs down the hill into my cup and where time belongs to mornings, noon, and supper.

Within these days that expand like hopes around a hope blindly, before the blade of reason I look into the depth of blue but not beyond.

Under these skies these days behind this skirt of trees hidden in the frolic of the sun and wind and shadow I burrow into autumn into walls, under rocks, down to cellars.

October 13, 1980

18

Sleep this hour before the year and rest and let me listen to you breathe Your hand upon your head upon the pillow on the floor flexes now and again kneading some small heart the button-bird we saw today on our walk so small he chirped with steam-less breath just chirp and wings We promised him protection and a place to feed He just fluttered down your spine Did you let him go?

Still again The new year’s near I best to wake you up so we can laugh to think how you almost slept it by Wake up now, listen, remember, hello.

January 2, 1980

19

Date God’s days pass sun to moon to sun There are no years numbered no months named just clouds under stars pulling past, gone So it has been from this empty porch, a succession of days like dominoes falling off into yesterday, done Again tonight clouds pass under stars above the porch, but no longer as empty thoughts but as new memories The unnumbered days and nameless nights that have passed this house return this season to home, to calendar days to recollection Christmas, to name a day, will be the beginning, the birth of memories.

December 25, 1980

20

Last snow With the last snow one week ago and blue night lows buried under zero since, a whole week’s business has been preserved seven days’ commerce in the snow.

The tracks no longer bear witness to the day’s routine. They have lost their rush to cover and curious errands from tree to tree.

Now there’s just a nest of confusion the prints no longer lead-on, they intersect or trample and wander off having given up.

Take this tender-toed doe, she tells it well.

Her slipper-prints have found a home in mine.

Having infinite avenues through these slender woods and a nose to know, she chose my prints, my bridge of snow, to lead her over chaos, back to home.

January 13, 1981

21

The others It was, I know, just a dream, but in my sleep last night I spoke to and knew your brother It was vague and specific like all dreams, preceded and followed by that curious cognizance of waking in the afternoon three times before rising But in between that before and that after there was a scene with snow; white whole and perfect like a round clean clock face There was a room bright with windows and its fixtures and surfaces and we were brimming with light that glowed about our edges and lit inward our skin to incandescence until our faces were clean and fresh like white Cloverine salve or the meat of a peach And we were talking, confiding, winking with knowing He was going to show me So he undid the latch and catch collar.

He lifted the hinged beamed ceiling and before he had raised it a foot he leapt, dove out-stretched oh forty, fifty, sixty feet! Oh farther than I had supposed, out into a fold of snow Astonished, I had thought he was going to straddle up over the sash. But his leap was a wonder! It raised my eyebrows and smile, and it thrilled me like easy answers to open-minded questions and I remember turning to exclaim to the others.

22

Remembrance It is to see remembrance at work Linda committing to memory her brothers asleep At first reading their faces above the ears of her newspaper then dropping the pretense to her lap for an unabashed study of them I see her measuring and comparing and rendering And I see her eyes erasing, then reassembling youth and experience finer lines, kinder curves, dearer colors Sometimes I see her draw lines without conclusions between the two; resolving the absence in her mind, remembering again Today in the car, Jack asleep at her side she laid back her head, rolled to his shoulder and studied him lovingly looking and overlooking gulping up lost time It was, I think, an adoration like mothers have for sons who have grown away from home.

February 16, 1981

23

March Now is March coming in like a lamb with a fleecing of snow a woolen morning, warm but white And the sun at noon now steep enough over the shed to shine on the last of our winter wood. It’s rock maple, the wrists and forearms of our front-yard grandfather; unsplit, dense - wood that could sink like a stone But it’s the bark of some of those brownskinned upper limbs that so reminded me of something else - of a rather long conclusion The bark, beaded and smooth, was like the brown backs of brook trout, thick at the fisheries in Spring. It was selfsatisfying to recognize the relationship And I smiled as I stacked those loaves of fishes in the shed, recalling their cool color in the tank, their school motion, their flash from green to gray to brown like leaves, high in a tree, swimming in night.

March 2, 1981

24

Striking out Arizona is far away It must be so from about everywhere Anyway, Joe is going there in only a day or more I don’t really know He’s talked about it before and now he’s going Mom didn’t say how much he’s taking but I imagine this being his first time and such a far ways he’ll take it all as much as he can carry as much as he can hold.

January 1981

25

Garagemen Your dad and my dad keep garages They are warm and hearth-like places that smell of heat in the Summer and oil in the Winter The walls and rafters read like manifests of time-bound cargoes left to fill less urgent crossings Here three oars share passage in the dark and a bicycle, two of them hang upside down above the blank bay door Hoses, clamps, jacks, baskets, jars, axes.

A place for the Christmas tree stand Both have sleds: old, new and newer hung high in the loft Relics are stacked like good intentions put up for better times They reflect the image I have of them, our fathers: as planners, hopers, lovers of our past, hoarders for our future.

May 1, 1981

26

Send them here If what we learn is true that you keep your kingdom from those who in their lives needed you most and in their distress took their lives themselves If you won’t have them then send them here I read it that you wrote yourself in that rule by offering us such eternal grace, but forgetting that you must have a catch to keep us all from peace too soon so much for my belief If you’ll not have them in your house then send them here Let them sit along our hill to watch the blue between the clouds, to hear the Summer birds begin and to watch me work; carting wood and building, and hopping courageously across the creek Let them watch and rest and laugh If you won’t have them then send them here Or do you keep them after all?

Is that your secret - one of them, that you, who loves us all, cannot tell us that of course you love them most and keep them comforted and close But if, in case, you don’t or can’t If some scripture keeps you from your conscience, keeps them from your bliss then send them here, to heaven on our hillside and spare them your abyss.

27

Chariot Now come too quickly, leaves too soon Morning climbs the coasert, rolls down noon Occasions fall to afterwards as fast as past can happen It seems it happens faster than my pocket watch can catch ‘em

November 1981

28

Portrait Before I show you this let me tell you Don’ t judge this first on resemblance Lines can stand alone without a mirror As you can love a song before you know its name so can beauty reside independent of what I want it to describe Regard what I have drawn first. See how I have lain line upon line, considered edges to enclosures Look for echoes in my shapes Recognize the order, the rhymes Then when you have seen the lines upon the paper, allow that line is also eyelash that erasure is silent cheek that soft lead line, slowly swept, is the parted quiet of your lips.

December 1981

29

To Mom C. on Christmas Day I try to think where I found it, in what room or closet I know it was coated like a cookie sheet (crumbs on Crisco) when I did find it At first, the sweep of the spout was enough to make it the find of the day Later, a burnish with emory brought a penny to my palm - copper kettle, copper pot And then it sat again - like the moon: one side bright, one side gone until this month Christmas kindled copper again, brought it back to mind To make a handle I poked around the shed and found a length of staff I cut roughly I whittled and scraped the grain until it had a tawny stripe I liked Measured, drilled, and pressed; it fit nicely Fashioning it upstairs at night, cool before the heater, I felt like a craftsman The copper was warm in my hand, the kettle comfortable on my eyes It reminds me of our home a little off center, out of plumb, but elegant then, now, and forever Hand-wrought, worn, and patched by me to make it work again.

December 1981

30

Tangerine Eating one, the Christmas sting still celebrating on my fingertips, I decided that one doesn’t peel a tangerine, one husks it - like a jacket from your back That’s why I champion it among citrus Once the peel is pulled from the fruit, not unlike the motion one would use to unsheath a baseball of its cowhide covers, the remaining ring of slices crowd each other like a huddle of fat fine shrimp pool-side on a cocktail And the pulp, the webbing of white pulp which gives the fruit the resistance I enjoy when I husk it, I eat - as I would the fine white cobwebs that grace aging bottles of wine.

January 14, 1982

31

Drive by Ah, grandmother old woman dear The sun’s a sinker in the west and the snow in its sight is a lawn licked with ice And you, in blue and blue and blue lean to your mailbox to check the days dispensation No news?

I’ll write.

January 27, 1982

32

Sand paintings - for Joe Transient their beauty anchored in symmetry their value reduced by a breeze What keen disciple determined that exquisite edge where breathtaking art must be set grain on grain in stillness to be worshipped and adored and, necessarily lost but to the mind’s eye; like the shape of day, the music in whispers, the chords of a storm.

February 2, 1982

33

Break up I see that tough old tree lodged in the Chenango from the previous thaw has made it through another Spring jam It lies a withered centerpiece in the river’s lacing eddies Thick bars of ice caught in its few game spokes are beached rafts for hungry gulls This anchor, rooted to the river-bottom will sprout soon - thin silver fishes like leaves in a breeze The gulls wait for these children to come shiners, live bait in the stream: thin-lipped willows to whistles through the waves.

March 19, 1982

34

Drinking it hot Rain was falling, morning rain in march.

It made the tree tips red, the brown bark stained, and the shadows of snow like loose caches of giggling diamonds.

My hands were red like the buds, raw like the rain.

My dingy sweater was soaked.

A deep-seated steam heaved from my lips with each slash of the ax.

I was in love with that rain in my sweater in that cold; a toe-deep contentedness with the clammy discomfort.

I was working in the rain in my practical wool like Hem on the Irati with smoky wet fires, dun faces, and damp boots to climb into.

But the promise of coffee!

Thin, hot, dry in a stoneware mug too hot to hold onto, but held onto.

And now the smell of my sweater like a dog in from the rain; wet, heavy, friendly.

Roughing it, loving it, drinking it hot.

March 16, 1982

35

In Arles Today more than ever I felt like brother Theo far from Arles distressed and lonely for Vincent And so I am going to start to send money In Arles, Joseph sells his blood twice a week to live I will tell Linda, send fifty, write, then send fifty again.

February 1982

36

Arch The sun shone and made shadows of the smoke It braced the blue sky and firmed the fingers of old maples Our fire, meant for the arch, consumed sheer air and light alike It made hot candy of Spring cuttings And we chased with steamy breath the swirling gulfs of breeze that tunneled down our hillside with brute intentions The fire ate Our cheeks blushed to the blasts of fire and ice And the sun shone, the smoke rippled and was blue.

March 28, 1982

37

For Russell In your garden yielding sweet fruit for all the innocent children watch please for our boy Hold him at night, rock him by day Teach him the words to the songs the angels sing And promise him we will be there before he grows another inch And keep him Lord a little boy - with cheeks like a peach until we are there to watch grow straight and strong into the life we live for him at home.

March 28, 1982

38

Today Often on the sofa, at ease, with the kitten on her lap Linda candles some conversation She rocks me with inflection and woos me with repose Her clothes drape warm and loose, her smile draws bright and from across the room she brings brings me so near to the edge of real life, real love that the kitten must move to show me that other lives revolve besides our own.

March 28, 1982

39

Slow burn, fast burn Last Summer when we kicked out your crutches and cracked with the ax the three hewn joints that bore your broken back, they snapped like pea pods, died with a sigh their fibrous strength seized up after years in the rain.

No quick collapse; this no tent of snow There was a drop, the clap of planks, then dust But it was no felling like a tree tremendous crash, the job done, the job clean, the stump sweating No, this was slower, less heroic There was rot and humous, rust and ruin All boards were flawed, leprous at the edges, twisted at their length, pocked with nails Some beams were earth or halfway there Popping them from the flooring, like wresting drumsticks from a turkey, I found them passing one life to another at noon in July.

We stacked the rot and wood around the foundation, three piles to three sides The creek mad e the square I left them for hauling.

And now Spring again, snow in April We make a fire of those timbers in the old foundation With offspring maples huddled by the blaze the building belches orange and fierce and glorious All burns, everything - rot, nails, wood, rain Again the sadness for tis is final. Grandpa’s garage gone.

But then I think 40

as I watch the belly of embers white-hot in the wind the building will remain here as though it rotted on the spot All that was made here and passed here and kept here will stay here and live here forever.

Slow burn, fast burn One life to another I watch the ascension I feel the heat.

February 6, 1982

41

Cross Bronx Parkway Four times down, I am still a tenderfoot.

This time into the city we ride the bulwark of the GeorgeWashington Bridge I thought of the aching cables anchored somewhere in stone, hot with straining.

We burrowed into the Bronx.

I was staggered by the granite, by our hewn path, by the concrete and steel, by the absolute grafting of city to stone.

I saw the fire-bombed buildings, the block after block of high-rise housing, the tha-rongs of people.

I was reeling with the awareness of Gargantuan consumption; gas and water, food, electricity. The horrors of the stifling myopic city screamed, but it did not shake the footings.

The stone was resolute, the concrete irreconcilable.

Oh I hate to say it, but the city works.

The bones, the veins, the nerves function as involuntarily as my own.

Yes, the city is a conundrum.

I could not converse with the conscience that it carries, but I could worship, I really could, the temple and its keepers.

April 18, 1982

42

I did this The rain in the morning and the mist in the air grew a cool day after Spring blossoms I took the .22 and five long rounds and walked the RR tracks, but it was too chilly for woodchucks I cut down to the river which was pale and gray to the field’s green preening Dark brown casements of earth and bark framed my walk. I found choke cherry blossoms and shad flowers and stood them in the pocket of my coat Down low were may apples and faint marsh flowers Like a target in a tree was an oriole He flirted with a mate Past the skunk cabbage and baby blades of hickory, down where the trout lily hugs the mud and the swale knots and empties like some wild intestine, I found, among matted reeds, two blossoms of Dutchman’s britches.

I took also its frond, split and feathered, to frame these stout bloomers And all I carried back up the damp grass rise to home forgetting to close the crossing, forgetting to wipe my boots.

May 2, 1982

43

Conversation The stones are warm in the sunshine.

My gratification is palpable clipping grass in the cemetery, trimming the headstones tightly.

The palm tree plantain begs cutting and falls cleanly as my clippers strike against the cracked-ice outcrop of concrete that beds the stone.

I clip and sweep shocks of grass that splay like yellow sheaves of farm-boy hair groomed dry for Sundays.

Holding back the paling leaves of pink geraniums I snip close and deftly; saving the cuttings to mulch the potted petunias.

I rest a hand on Lillian’ s stone. It is not cold.

It is warm like a thing alive, even now in the twilight.

Timeless granite holds the sun, restores it to my touch.

I move to another stone, some fellow from the first war, and small-talk as I ease around his ears.

I stop at others, four together in a row, and then a single bible name not tended to this season.

We bring water to all and read aloud across the ruins; trying on names, mourning the lonely left to bring flowers.

It is a dialogue of sorts: being kind.

They all were here once, as real as me.

I whisper as I bend and hold and snatch at blades beneath my breath.

I whisper hello, and hey there, and I see you you have a birthday today.

June 1982

44

Beginning When the old-fashioned roses blushed into bloom and the meadow lily rang in the woods loud orange When the river rowed rainwater-warm past my bobber and bluegills cast shadows on the silt When raspberries trimmed the hedgerows and lone blackcaps colored their clusters When white daisies ran at the roadside and green butternuts first fell from the tree When lunch was cool milk and Bing cherries and the breeze was a song from the shade we rose like two loaves for the oven to bake a bread we had made.

July 1982

45

Neighbors Mrs. Ryker and her boy were working out in the yard Her white dress flowed like poured cream Her hair, laced in a crown of braids, broke black, shattered white And he, deformed, in blue-blue overalls and wide-brimmed hat pulling his head down like a heavy-hooded bloom nodded away from the sun Both clean-kept, outside in the sun, briefly Bo Radley with his mother, both gentler than my thoughts of Sunday.

August 4, 1982

46

In season Yesterday, it was blackberries on dead brambles, the berries so ripe on the withered stems they tumbled through the thorny grid to my bucket below. Too sweet to have.

I thought then I might see significance in that sacrifice fruit so ripe on limbs so spent.

Today, dangling in the doorways were daughters, ripe and over-ripe.

And they were fruit, but whereas yesterday I lusted after that sweetness today my heart went out to the briars arching like rainbows forfeited of color bearing that sustenance unseen in their roots.

August 1982

47

Big red band I raised my eyes to meet my mirage, to see what I desired The sun was non us like a blessing It shimmered every corner Down on the green I tried to pick him out the sun a polish on his brow In among the players, in breath among the band I looked not for resemblance, but for him He was there if I could find him I do believe he entered with the band heralded with trumpets his love one hundred strong She cried when she saw him I heard him play the song.

October 2, 1982

48

Autumn I rake past dusk, past my supper hour The leaves, in piles, stare back without color I know them by their crunch only and by that baked bread smell of a season’s roasting The sky is opulent and clear like Linda’s back when she huddles like a pearl The atmosphere is vacuous sucked up this lordly maple to pucker edges and angles crisp and thin I hear children’s voices leap across the river into evening Sweeps of birds plunge out of light, their checkered courses disorienting my heart It speeds and slows The night is right for breathing and looking full-about I smell the toasted leaves peppered by the edge of night and sweetened by the bacon flag of smoke that warbles up the flue and paints a plate of stars on Dresden blue.

October 20, 1982

49

Bell In the same way that a teardrop falling only to a collar yet assumes a lovely swept shape drawn by hard-edged facts and physical laws that govern the sky, so also will you ripen and warm like a slow fruit or deep bell your symmetry like blown glass smooth and mysteriously formed concealing in its grace the geometry of growth.

November 5, 1982

50

At night Is he in darkness or does his world glow like the promise of sunrise through the porch shades on amber mornings?

Does he know that streaming yellow warmth when the shade is cracked and my first eyes see the frosty lawn and motionless steps happy for light?

Is my voice deep in another room telling secrets, does he crave the words and distinction?

Can I soothe him into sleep with the sandy sound of my hand around your shoulder whispers for the skin?

And can my lap be a cradle for you both, a bowl for your affections?

Does he know when I am close to you, but silent?

Is your steady breath at night an opiate like the motor of darkness that settles on the porch like clean sheets on Spring beds?

And what does he feel when you speak?

Do his lungs and limbs and lips tingle with speech, does he hum in his jar like a firefly?

And will he remember the words we speak to him now, the kisses, the blessings the time when you were his world, his heart beat, his dome of heaven?

November 10, 1982

51

Carol Innocence Today I saw it turn its back on love Being blameless its motive had no eyes Without intent the hurt fell to a lesser charge But how shall we explain away the wound?

Just here a tiny smile and wordless heart walked out on love How shall I blame innocence?

Who shall I love?

December 18, 1982

52

Ready for wings We shared a horror In a woods with soft floor and marble clouds remoteness and rain we claimed obsession and a nimble hymn The horror was nit the gutting the soft volumes or dusty tongue And the horror was not ghastly It was stunning like lightening, right there, at the window having such potency for fear, but inflicting only wonder For myself and kid brother it must remain a tale beyond telling an encounter with our source I will tell you though that no other brush with heaven has ever cultivated in me a greater sense of awe and responsibility it was not the killing, not the redness of life It was the way it just left, poured, all streamed as from a pitcher It was so definite full, then empty Cleanly disembodied, weightless, ready for wings.

November 30, 1982 53

Best time The snow squall trundled in Friday noon and paved the road fresh black Amid the hand greetings I fetched John a favor, filling his tin thermos hot with coffee.

Flakes died on the wool as it passed the plaid into his pocket.

And when Joe arrived, red eyes hidden in his crinkled smile and smooth face I asked, “Could you eat some soup?”

He answered so gladly, pleasant and considered that I smiled to the sugar bowl as I folded bread to make his meal.

The next noon I carted coffee and cookies up the hill to Bill in the papoose of Dad’s mackinaw.

Four hours in the freeze had him stiff in the lips.

I held both arms as he poured a blue cup of comfort and spoke in steaming winces of the morning’s dispensation.

What i did each time was small little cups and puddles of drink, but I wanted to take care of them, keep them warm. give them spoonfuls of all I had.

November 30, 1982

54

China shop It was like a gathering of gales four winds in full voice robust and kinetic within the six corners of my house, big things with thoughtless elbows and plaid flannel virtues grown too tight for buttons, roiling red hands hot mugs and tousled hair under full sail.

November 1982

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Through snowfall I wonder who was returning when you came toward me through the snow?

You looked like a muffed and bustled girl gliding steadily off the page from a 1908 Sears & Roebuck catalog.

It was your 3/4 coat and 3/4 skirt that absorbed all movement above your knees so that you sailed up the main motionless. You tacked noiselessly in a flotsam of snow.

And greeting you, now close between the flakes, was like discovering you again each day asleep, awake a voice before dark.

January 17, 1983

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Cicadas I need the silence of cicadas.

Their drone draws away involvement and leaves me on the porch alone alone with the view, alone with the melody of thought that I cannot hear amid conversation in the bright of day.

Cicadas play me the song I hear from my pillow.

It recedes constantly like the outbound hiss of tires on the turnpike across the valley; trolleying some distance away.

It is not sleep I want, it is unencumbrance I need time to follow the hollows of my astigmatism against the open blue of day, chasing them into indigo into where crickets begin.

January 27, 1983

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The dearest gift The dearest gift I got this year was a creased afternoon of snow mutely singing, like someone else’s memory alive in their eyes.

It is a common box I will keep for the pulp picture you glued to the cover.

It sheets out over the lap of the corners like an out-sized doily, but the Brueghel boys and girls skate so sweetly on the voiceless snow, the tin-type top, that I can hear the leaping of their laughter play off the corduroy crown across the valley.

Your taking time to fashion what you found into this decorated box added real value to my gaining the day.

It framed so affectionately your effort to make my day from scratch.

And that is what warms me about this page of snow.

I can get tangled in its simplicity, wrapped in what the silence tells me of how love used to be and used to be given little girls clipping pictures, growing curls, honoring papa with affection and mama with flowers.

The family playing here, down past the gate of trees, is out of my listening.

Their calling to each other of “Watch me! Watch me!” arrives late on my ears like the flat clap of the ax after action.

I hear only melodies now, not words.

Indeed, their frozen action dots this page like notes within blank measures.

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Listen now. The wind sings after them, after they are gone.

But I have them here, out the window of this box; framed with curled corners, nostalgic through puddled glass.

I see them skating at the river.

And when each February comes and the winter outside is snow on Sunday, I will compare the box and the day to see that I keep them close because I value what you gave me when you clipped and glued this picture.

It will remind me of what i love and how I best can share it.

February 6, 1983

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