Freely accepted, constraints that bind
The senses can free the mind.

And so I knelt before her latitude.
Her choker became the horizon,
The light from her eyes a silent beatitude.

“What do you feel?” asked the voice of the wind.
I tried to answer, lips rapt and spellbound,
Eyes questing, but made no sound.

Enlarged by desire, encircled by pain,
I felt the fire and the rain.

I watched the walls of the room
Dissolve into clouds
As a crack in the sky beckoned,
Opening wide.

I was pulled upward into a swelling storm
And watched all around as I climbed
A mirror world form,
Like the universe rhymed.

Then calm.  I found myself at a steely gate.
A sign read “The Labyrinth of Language.”
The path began straight
Then forked into uncountable branches.

Words took shape and tried to dance
But hung
Captive on my soundless tongue.
They have remained there ever since.

Free them, goddess,
Let these words find flight.
Take them from the shadow of my tongue.
Release them into your luminous night.

(for Peggy, with Alzheimer’s, 1996)*

Absent spirit:
Soothe our hunger for consolation
In the presence of this woman
Who asks for none.

May the colored shapes we have become
Stand apart from these walls--
Where sun after sun has tiled
A catacomb of days--
Distinctly enough to radiate our love.

Banish our loss.
Dissolve the bitter mystery of why.
Forgive our numb embrace
That enfolds this slumping body
Whose eyes reflect glass,
Whose mind quests beyond a dark door
Searching for a land of lost names.

Give words to her passage.
Resolve the twisted path she must follow alone,
The cratered wastes she calls across,
Seeking a land of kindred beings with cognate powers
That name her as their own and exult.

Speaking to you from a photograph,
No longer body but idea,
I say these words
Without the twitch of a muscle.

As the August wind twined your hair
Into absurd weavings,
You heard emptiness echo.
You held emptiness instead of a hand.
You heard silence instead of your name.

As my train thundered toward a dream world,
I became an abstraction,
A solemn idea demanding a ceremonial tear.

I will wander blankly in a new place
Among blank faces, thinking of you.

As trees fly backwards at the speed of sleep,
I whisper that I love you,
But the train hears only its own roar.

I

We played kick the can
Where the sidewalk cracked,
Ruptured by a cottonwood’s roots.  
Then winds from the canyon came rushing
Through the leaves of the tall cottonwoods
(I believed that sound was the sound
Of time rushing away),
And sent us home.

I paused on the front porch.
From across the street a faint mist drifted,  
Rainbird spray from Reservoir Park,
Chuff chuff chuff chuff
Chuff-chuff-chuff-chuff-chuff- chuff-chuff-chuff.
At the horizon beyond the park,
Jagged streaks of pink tapered into purplish dusk
Above the shrinking mirror of Great Salt Lake.

II

I entered the silent house
Where something strange was taking place.  
Darkness billowed from the living room couch.
Ink oozed from unlit lamps.
Shadows deformed familiar shapes:  
Chairs, an end table, a portrait, the piano,
A piece of driftwood from the Dead Sea.
I watched my hands flicker,
Merge into shade, dissolve.
I stood trying to grasp
What the darkness was doing.    

Then an engine hummed in the driveway,  
Tires crunching asphalt,
A car hummed into the garage. Voices.
The kitchen door opened.
The darkness retreated
Behind the sofa and beneath solid chairs.  
The simple shapes returned,
Pulled across a boundary into night
From a summer evening on University Street.

He sat in dewy grass
Writing a pastoral dialog.
“And death is also here,” mused he.
“All art depends on gravity.”
He neatly ordered his pages.

She wove lilacs in her hair,
Standing on moss in the damp morning air.

He considered that God might be in all things.
Was he blaspheming by crushing the grass?
But of course Bentham’s calculus obviates sin.
He thoughtfully scratched his chin.

She approached him from behind,
Dismayed by the clutch of wildflowers
Someone had wrenched out by the roots and thrown away,
Yet suffused in the absolute peace of that day.

She touched his arm—a summons.
What was that sensation?
He was left without rational explanation.