We argue over the proper gift
to give a friend for his wedding:
I want serrated,
she wants sharp and smooth.
The same week she trimmed
her fingertip into the celery,
I wrote two poems:
one of love, one of war,
serrated and sharp at once.
Oh how the hot blood flowed!
FALL COLORS
That maple, burning yellow,
balds from the top.
Nearby elms drop shriveled husks
revealing graceful dancer’s arms.
The euonymus becomes a ball of rose.
Buckthorns stubbornly stay green.
So you and I can be different too.
You hang on tight to your red passion
while I let my green fall,
eager to start the next life.
DEPARTURE
Sheathed in black,
she sharpens herself
against the baggage counter,
the blade of her
straight and quick.
Be careful, she said,
this is a fragile moment
in our thirty years. Then
stepped toward United
as if a plane herself.
She flew east toward a grief so deep
it took her thirty years to name it.
I drove twelve hundred miles west
to red and angry canyons hidden
in the lies of old priests and professors.
We moved over the same earth
past our time together
toward something powerful, dark,
able to be dug up
only when alone.
EXPEDITION ALONE
In Peru the beautiful airline attendant
waved her painted fingernails in front of me.
In Peru the high school girls sat with me
as I drank cappuccino
and we practiced English for hours.
In Peru the schoolteacher’s wife asked
if I wanted to buy
her butterfly collection.
In Peru the Quechua woman hurled her sack
of potatoes over the side of the truck
and pulled herself in
on top of me.
In Peru the young Catholic girl
in her gray schoolgirl’s uniform
came up to my raft
parked in the sun on the riverbank.
Her teeth were as white
as the glaciers overhead,
and she gave to me from beneath
her sweater
bright oranges.
In Peru four young girls threshed corn
in the dooryard.
In Peru a woman with leather feet
cut open white chocolate beans
in the sun.
In Peru the rainy season washed out
the mountain road
and one could go no further
though roosters strolled the gap
like satyrs.
SKIN LIKE BOTTICELLI’S VENUS
How dare you be so smooth,
stranger on the mountain path?
How dare you brush
one silk thigh with the other
like wildflowers in light breeze,
the fragrance of California
sage rising around you?
Your skin sheathes you
like a fine wine’s finish
sparkles along the tongue,
like memories of starlight
spilling over bent grass.
None of you I dare touch,
as I dare not touch
Botticelli’s Venus’s hand.
Lest I enter that
luminescent world,
grow luminous myself,
unreal, totally lost.
MY WIFE SLEEPING AS I DRIVE
She trusts no one. Even sleeping
she keeps one foot on the dashboard,
a last defense against troubles.
Without her on watch, the sleeping world
could lose its way, stumble as we
once did into old and painful traps.
At sunset, the undersides of clouds
ripple with rose and gold.
Her head heavy on her chest,
rare silhouette,
hushes me at the wheel.
Next to the highway, deer
graze corn stubble in twilight.
At their hooves, wild
turkeys look and feed.
We plunge along our course of earth,
each alert in our own way,
ahead the blue-black sky full
of oncoming lights and stars.
AND STILL SHE BLOOMS
Rains flood western mountains.
Lightning shatters eastern shores.
Ice cracks limbs, gophers siphon roots.
And still she blooms, waving
smartly over the tall grass.
Bumblebees freighted with pollen
buzz by again, again,
fixed by her calyx tilt,
tasting her multicolored tongue.
They’re drunk, forgetful,
as if no winter ever were.
As if soft swellings such as hers
will sway forever in whatever wind.
AT THE TEMPLE OF APHRODITE
Aphrodisias, Turkey, September
The fragrance of white clover
no bigger than the new toes of babies
intoxicates an entire valley.
Bees stumble, butterflies whirl, finches dance.
Dionysus laughs from the stone
shoulders of satyrs
wrapped in garlands of plums.
A marble mountain, crowned ten million
summers’ white, shines over this city built
by a freed slave to his love of Love.
Two thousand years have flowered before we
see her smooth, carved blossoms
garlanding the ground at Aphrodite’s
imposing entrance, where pious
muezzins call from two directions
for midday prayer. We pray . . .
to the fragrance of loved stone,
tousled heads and limbs and torsos,
whole epics frozen in marble against cerulean sky.
We are all slaves in this Temple where love began
at a nearby spring and ends in sweetness
bubbling from cubes of sugar breathing in clear tea
near a plate of olives and ripe tomatoes
set before you, my peerless Aphrodite.
SWIMMING IN THE SEA OF TIME
The book in my hands is by Wallace Stegner,
about friendship it turns out, and my mind
wanders back over forty-six years
to when we too were just married,
a basement apartment, the first baby
in the crib in our closet, a new friend
across the hall in the janitor’s closet.
Soon enough we visited another friend,
witnessed his marriage, today a doctor any of us
would want, avuncular and truth-telling,
visited him again, his house in the mountains.
The doctor sent me Crossing to Safety last spring,
insisted we read it, and so today,
Saturday at dawn, before the celebration
of other friends’ fortieth anniversary,
who drew us to New York,
my wife driving here with her friend
since summer camp, now my friend too,
I stumble around my sister-in-law’s
apartment, drunk on coffee,
swimming in a sea of time,
window open, air humid and gray,
breeze swaddling me,
garbage trucks groaning below,
the view a universe of rooftops.
NEW NEW MEXICO WOMAN
for granddaughter Olivia,
one day old
Already this question answered:
Can you breathe in light so sharp it makes gods
shudder, pulls artists to their knees?
My northern eyes burn
from the bright light of your birth.
When I visit, I’ll bring my watery hand.
When we touch, you will not forget
the odd warp of my middle nail,
the raised blue veins like seagrass
under water.
And I will bring this vow.
We will go together among
my lakes, your hills.
These will not be stories that we tell
but waters that we swim
and air we breathe.
Your eyes will grow as sharp as
all the artists where you live, who,
shocked by the beauty of the world,
fight for it, peacefully, all their lives.
And you will leap in my sweet waters
like a seal sounding in the waves,
rising open-eyed and laughing
from the buoyancy that birthed us all.
YOU KNOW WHAT I KNOW
for Henno
I met you four days old,
your skull soft as petals,
brows flowing over your cheeks
like standing waves,
eyes sealed against
a blizzard’s light.
In two days as we walked
in gathering snow,
you feasted on our air,
our daughter’s milk,
your thumb.
I held you six days old
to say goodbye,
rocked you back and forth
within our breath.
You winked at me—
one eye blue and black at once,
part fish, part bird—
and raised an impish smile
at the corner of your mouth.
I saw my father,
his eightieth birthday,
pacing back and forth
framing the stories
he would tell to friends
who waited, wondering
what he knew.
At my grave, you’ll look up
toward rustling leaves in winter,
a busy, hammering woodpecker,
the two-note whistling love call
of the chickadee I will teach you.
Again, your lip will rise at the corner.
Again one eye winks at the sun.
You know what I know.
There is no death.
THE POET VISITS HIS SON, A CONCERT PROMOTER, AND ATTENDS A MICHAEL FRANTI CONCERT
It is quiet I long for, that calls forth ecstasy
the way a river calls forth its mouth,
the stillness of shimmer in dry leaves,
the vivid fall colors of dreams,
the fascination of the grave.
Yet here, under booming speakers tall as buildings,
fifteen hundred of us rise up on our toes,
men old as me, and children spinning,
all waving and clapping our palms,
giving our bodies away to this gentle man
and his guitarist with hair like a goat,
the African drummer with the voice of a bird,
Franti’s dreadlocked head and open heart,
his body’s music a holy poem.
What a bargain at thirty-five dollars a ticket,
my son behind the scenes the way parents sweat
and worry profit and loss behind the scenes.
Tonight a line of glowing strangers thanks my son.
Michael thanks him.
I too shake his hand.
DANCING AT WINTER SOLSTICE
We live where city lights make time obscure.
We do not know how bright day is,
how dark night.
One must travel half a world
for mountain priests
to catch the sun and bring it back again.
They know that if sun goes, hope goes.
Stars spin stories of our birth
and sing us holy songs,
but there’s too much light between
to feed the heart.
The moon laughs or cries,
who really knows?
Last night we danced and drank so late
the sun, stirred from its grave,
burned off the frost that coats our hearts.
I reached to touch the hairs above your wrist.
They blossomed at your thigh.
Stars rose and fell and rose again
in the fire of your eyes.
WILD SWANS NEAR GLADSTONE
A pair of swans lingers in the bay
opposite the freeway in upper Michigan in summer.
“Mated for life,” I point out to my wife.
“Mute swans,” she says, not looking,
“no need to talk.” I note the graceful mute life,
When her eyes, weary, reluctantly offer me
the wheel, it is like relinquishing a broken
sword into tall grass after a day of battle.
Now my turn to drive, and my mind wanders
over the pair of elegant swans seen every time
we pass the curve of the bay together, or alone.
BEFORE THE GRANDCHILDREN ARRIVE
This is a morning for chores, reading, poems.
Because tomorrow, early, the bedroom door
will creak open with the sun
and the word “Grandpa” flood in like
Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,
marching me up off the sheets and back
into the beauty of the world,
like a young Lewis or Clark
or exhausted Magellan,
or the billion other grandparents
sensing again the web of the world,
hearing again its spinning song.
WATCHING GUS DRAW
Dawn on a still day, I am reading
Kim Stafford’s Early Morning,
a memoir of his quiet poet father,
when Gus comes down. We brush fingertips,
enough touch for this time of day, and he sits,
his nine-year-old body fuzzy with sleep.
After a while, he has decided to draw,
for he arrives at the table next to me with
instruction books and colored pencils.
As I slowly conclude the chapter
“Millions of Intricate Moves,”
Gus sits cross-legged on a wicker chaise
inspecting the open art book,
then executing its strokes,
sunlight tousling his red-gold hair.
So this is how this physical boy spends
an early morning,
before the bicycle of his body propels him
off at great speed through the humming day.
I watch him from the warmth
of Stafford’s open hand,
raising my eyebrow perhaps a quarter inch
as Gus retrieves a dropped pencil
and discovers the spider’s web beneath
the chaise, and the corpse of a wasp.
END OF SUMMER
Fog hangs over the Straits. Iron ore
freighters call out, dragging their
heavy bellies toward distant kilns.
I build a fire from birch split that afternoon,
push charred ends toward the center.
My hands darken with ash.
I pick two poems to read at dinner
from the manuscript of a friend,
dead now, with us here.
Above me, a son sings in the shower.
From the kitchen, lemon and garlic.
Down the stairs, a daughter’s perfume.
A MIRROR IN ROME
In the mirror you say
you see a worn woman.
; And that you’ve earned
your worry lines and evidence
of gravity’s steady pull
and enough money
to erase them both with
a modern sculptor’s scalpel
if you choose.
But when I look at you
from behind my trifocals
over a white blizzard of beard
that hides the cave of
my few words,
I see you standing as only
you have stood before me,
your callipygian tilt the model
for that famous sculpture
now in Naples,
your skin radiant as fox fire
from the memory
of four sublime babies
now wandering like Aeneas
this protean earth,
no sculpture more beautiful than this.
When I am laid
to rest
next to you
in the glaciated soils
of Minneapolis or Mackinac,
we will have little to say
to each other over that distance
wide as a kitchen table,
the stories of our lives written
in what we did together,
not the silences between.