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
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,
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
back to say the trees
and from them sings
every leaf distinct,
sun the soloist in
this dark concerto.
2.V.23
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
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
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