Reading Emerson
Waking in the night, I rise and pad old boards
That sound my passage in the dark. A mirror
Stops me cold— floats back a shadow-body,
A glinting stooped likeness, here and not here,
Crosshatched by tree branch and moonlight.
We "haunt our lives"— Emerson come back
From my afternoon's reading. Outside,
Five dwarf apple trees shadow the grass.
Two deer have come to eat the windfall.
They draw the shadows around themselves,
Become the trees: quick-muscled limbs
All slow motion, each leaf noise held in
Articulated ears. Now three more inscribe
Themselves on the pearled edge of grass.
Why do I want to clap my hands, whistle, hoot?
Anything to make them move. Their patience tires.
Back in bed, the light's unassignable moment
By moment evolution begins, the sky graying.
"Every look should thrill"— Emerson again,
"Should" a stone his sentence trips over,
A hard reminder of how the world keeps slipping
From attention. Soon the moon will pass
Into the opening mouths of birds whose songs
Will break this darkness. Soon the deer
Will vanish as if they were never here,
As if they are a dream I will wake from
When I rise again, nothing here but shadows
Thrown by the apple trees on which the sun falls.
The Cup
What longing you had to be nothing more
Than the light moving
Across the grass like the stateliest ship.
To move into a light you could not glimpse.
How many times in the dark
Too dark to see in, death came to you,
A weightless lover, and unraveled its beautiful oasis
Out of nothing for you.
And each time you must have thought, "It is right
That I go away and not return."
And yet, after the days
Had lost any gleam of welcome,
After sleep had become a battle
To wake to another pain, it took only our voices
To call you back. There we sat, at bedside,
Saying your name.
As though a human voice could dispel the dream
You wanted to become the world,
You stayed. Or as you though you had learned
From all those years
Of sitting at dusk with neighbors,
One or two to a stoop, the close houses
Like sunstruck metal giving back the day's heat,
That there is no place else to go.
Or perhaps the cup of unhappiness you drank from
Was not emptied
Until we could say, "You must go now,
Your suffering is too much for us to bear."
