California Morning
February, Avila Beach
To winter-dull ears what a reveille,
this medley of finches, and who knows
what—west coast jays, titmice, chickadees,
mockers? It’s the gladdest ruckus
we’ve heard in months, little bird brawls,
brushing twigs so they tip last night’s rain,
splattering us with drips and chirps.
We lean out over the rail, aching
our necks to look up the skirts of trees,
wanting to get-it-get-it, go from tease
to that sweet spot the binoculars
could zoom us into, zip us up among
those yellow and blue flirts we half wish
we could be, flitting in and out
of the limbs, flaring our wings, singing
got-it-got-it, tail feathers fanned—and if
not that, can we at least drink our tea
and be at peace in the almost, in the brief,
even in the not, the flyby without,
in the tight space between stem
and leaf, between longing and let-go?
The Edge of Town
I loaded stones from the Irish coast into my suitcase,
till I felt like that overwrought saint who,
instead of picking one ribbon as offered,
grabbed the entire box and ran. I would have
taken the whole wild western coast, wave-strewn
layers of sediment pressed down and heaved up,
left as rubble, then smoothed by the sea’s
agitated prancing in its rocky stall.
It was that rough shore I wanted. And more,
its long view back to something older than age.
Those two huge upright stones with a stone slab
capping them left to mark the dead
as if death were an old implacable god,
an ancient relentless one to stand before
dumbstruck. Centuries of cattle had rubbed
the rock black. Five thousand years of rain
had pocked the roof. Cloud shadows blew
across the flimsy moments we stood there
at that narrow gateway back, past the past
into grunt and squat, lightning strike,
peat smolder, into a time when time was hunger
and weather, when heaving one heavy thing
on top of another was the loudest prayer,
though whatever they said is pressed now
into a thin ribbon of quartz. In the distance,
gulls turned, first into small glints, then into
nothing at all. That must be how, if the past
had eyes, it would see us, dizzy with
disappearing, cheeks pressed against rock,
a blustery wind scrubbing our faces,
in one afternoon worn down to foam scud,
mica flash, bone—one afternoon and a storm
out at sea, on whose edges we walked
picking up stones. And here they are,
heaped at the foot of our stairs, prayers
from before beads, before chisels cut dates
into rock to stop the dissolve. Gems
too wild for a jeweler to tame, too rough
for anyone’s finger or neck. Faceless clocks
calibrated to measure eons, not hours. We wanted
to remember what had already forgotten us,
since when we stopped at the edge of town
to look back, the sea had turned away,
that light-seared, cloud-blown battering sea,
just a glint now through the window
of an old stone church, wild in its ruin,
waiting for wind and water to batter it more,
and unmortar, possess it completely.
Rooms Overhead
Thunder crashes like furniture dropped overhead,
those childhood angels rearranging their rooms.
Bureau, bookshelf, bed–grounded again, my daughter
shoves them across the floor, anger pumping her veins.
Soon I hear singing and know she is pleased
to be solving in space the problem that eluded her:
grownups refusing to be moved.
When I was a child and angels argued slamming doors,
I lolled, feet up the couch, head on the floor
envisioning other rooms silent and spare as ceilings
where weight couldn't go, nothing that breaks.
I couldn't budge a thing in the world outside
so I kept rearranging mine, loved waking to new
angles of light, books against a different wall
as if the same words might have powers I never guessed.
I heard all the shifting above, as if God wore boots
and strode through rooms kicking pianos, ripping drapes
while downstairs china rattled in the cabinet,
window cords broke. My father was already dead.
Now my grandfather began to mutter and glare,
my sister left on a boat for Africa,
Watching cracks in the ceiling I half expected it
to open on another world where the lost would be found:
a shaft of light, angels crowding my room, opening
drawers, spilling perfume. I stopped wanting those wings
and thought of a new language–shells, stones, hard things
you could line up and count, put in boxes, new words
strong as a shoe pounding the table.
Everyone looked up astonished as if the furniture had drained
from the room when my feathery whispers turned leather.
My mother wrote my sister, she didn't know what to do,
and my sister sent back letters to me, pictures of herself
surrounded by thatched roofs and vines. She sent words,
flashy ones that sounded like what they named: grasshopper,
thunder, a small rodent we don't even have in America.
All this was to say how big the world is, and don't be afraid.
She had a language full of phrases about how the sky could
blacken and crack like anger, the rain could pour,
and then miraculously be over, all forgiven, everything
clear, no sign except leaves dripping under a faultless
blue tropical sky.
Bayhead, New Jersy 1906
No one has thought about destroying the sand dunes.
The young man practicing photography, the grandfather
I have never seen, only focuses on the footprints
spreading across them, and the little boy sliding
down in high buttoned shoes and a white dress.
But the gets the dunes too–in shadow and light
their grasses bent, the sea breaking between peaks.
And the child, rubbing his limbs in wide arcs
to make sand angels, is dwarfed by them–
as though there are places where we know
everything that will happen will happen.
Then, movies are invented and the wind blows
footprints away. Dump trucks, bulldozers
tanks are invented. The sea comes up
to the road in winter. The rich build houses
on stilts, invent no trespassing signs.
Newsreels. Depression. Two wars.
Congenital heart disease. The need to know
where we came from. The necessity of proving
the dead used to live, the living
had fathers and mothers.
The Same Elegy Never Completed
Each Day It's a Different Death
for my father
Your life is over before mine begins
like some electrical implantation
that leaves just the idea of you
I used to know the difference
between you and all the dead presidents
you and all the dead miners
who were illiterate and drunk by 6:30
the people who did not die
at their desks well dressed
and in control of things
When the car broke down in a snowstorm
just outside Jim Thorpe Pennsylvania
I wanted to feel at home
Nothing of us may ever reach the stars
but all the flowers in the Trenton graveyard
have had their fill of you
