I grew up near Floyd Bennet field

I grew up near Floyd Bennet field
in Brooklyn, just military then
so I never got to stand in it.
All the airports I have known
from Idlewild a little older
to Bagdogra where the tigers roar
nothing prepared me for the sky
now that I am alone in it,
standing on earth, maybe,
but all I can see is that blue
gulping the earth up into
its glorious vacancy. A critic
would explain I mean
a clueless sky over Cedar Hill
and otherwise I’m just
showing off as usual, using
a thousand words where one
yawn or sob wold do the job.
Do the trick, he’d say, but it is
no trick, it is a long slow sigh,
the mind you hear in a cathedral
or imagine you would if you
dared to go to such places.
I just mean for half an hour
I’m alone with the sky —
the sky doesn’t seem to mind.

11 May 2023

OPTICS

1.
Precision. A lens.
High magnification
smaller field of vision.
To see birds better.
Buy binoculars. Recall
human history of optics.
Who saw what. Dee’s
black shewstone, see
better in the dark. Fresnel.
Galileo. Mary looking
up at the angel.

2.
Speaking of angels,
remember the one
posted at Eden’s gate,
flaming sword, to make
sure Adam didn’t sneak back in?
I wonder if that radiant
sentinel sometimes turned
and peered back into Eden
and from what he saw,
or didn’t see built a message
he came down to earth with
to console Adam and his kin–
you can’t go there, but with
the lens of the mind you can see
and by seeing almost be there.
Here, try this magnifying lens,
I made it for you from sand
of Eden, turned glass
by the fire of my sword.

 

3.
Grosbeak. Oriole… Wren.
We mark them in our minds
by seeing them up close
without violating the sacred
space of their distance. Bench.
Fence. Feeder. Put the spyglass
back in the satchel. No way out
from what we have seen. Seeing
is such a commitment! I can hear
the wise woman say as she picks
up the remote to turn TV off.

 

4.
The way Pieter Saenredam
could see a church, sent his eye
high up to the roof of the nave
so his painting could look down
on the immense emptiness
of the cathedral, made emptier
by a person or two but how
could he see himself down there
from way up here, where we are?

5.
So when your eyes
are far
away enough
you can see everything.

10 May 2023

Every poem

Every poem
is a sealed indictment.
Open it only
when you’re alone
is the empty
courtroom of the soul.

10 May 2023

A poet is a person

A poet is a person
on trial
in a round courtroom
before eight
billion judges,
demonstrate innocence
by language alone.

9.V.23

MONDAY

Tiny principality along
the Hudson River, Its flag
a newly invented fabric:
mirror silk, it shows you
looking at it, through it,
ripples when you salute.
The nation’s motto:
You see what you are.
Others translate it:
You are what you see.

8 May 2023

We say Tell the time

We say Tell the time
but what do we tell it?
What can time be told
it hasn’t heard already?
Woodpecker on house wall
says it all over again
and then the wren
whistles one more epiphany.
No, time keeps telling me,
and I have to use so many
words to say my silence.

7 May 2023

Organdy

Organdy,
I hear my mother’s voice
saying the word,
how rich it sounded,
still sounds,
the curtain on the window
full of light,
some of it in the cloth itself.
She smiled as she named it
so I would have a new word.
Some smiles last forever.

5 May 2023

Now the sun comes

Now the sun comes
back to say the trees

and from them sings
every leaf distinct,

sun the soloist in
this dark concerto.

2.V.23

MAY DAY

And what should we believe?
All the dreams
that rained down
so heavily all yesterday
seemed worth the mind
they flickered through.

Games rained out,
streams overflowing,
man playing the twin-
barreled reed aulos
to wild applause, how
we can sing two songs at once.

It’s all in the fingers
and the circle of breath.

2.
May Eve they called it,
that famous last night
that comes every year.
I sat in the car a while
sheltering, the rain
pelted on the roof,
atonal marimba as
the window fogged over
with my own breath
and I tried to believe.

3.
What is the meaning
of Walpurgisnacht?
It’s not all witches and weird.
It’s about suddenly
in darkness realizing
you are not alone,
are never alone, and all
things and all beings
around you have dreams
of their own. Schemes.
Bonfires and signal flares,
cell phones and Acropolis.

4.
Then daylight comes,
morning, the day itself
as footnote to the night.
And all the citizens
of the dark put on their
fresh new clothes
and sing in tune.

Get ready–it’s time for that radiant fantasy called now.

1 May 2023

The loveliest thing about writing

The loveliest thing about writing
is you can’t tell where it’s going.
Even if you have your last line
firmly in mind, you can’t control
what the words get up to
along the way. Something always comes to mind between one word and the next, and after
every word a gap like a river–
who knows what they speak
over there, with that weird
flag flapping on a mound
you have no binoculars to help.

No, you have to cross the gap
all by yourself, bark out a word
and hold till it ferries you over
and dumps you in silence
halfway there so you have to
Flounder out and come ashore,
the mighty river was a trickle,
that flag a flutter in magnolia.

You’ve found the new word now
and weary though you may be
it will carry you to the next,
the next, the next. That’s all
I know about getting there.

10 April 2023