2
Ancient farmers in dry places
Watched the clouds.
Clouds mean rain.
Rain means life.
And so they discovered
That human fate falls from the sky
And rises from the ground.
This is the source of all mystery.

1
The sky is not a barrier but a portal.
Study carefully.  
It may be your only way out.

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.

I stood on the landing
Mouthing words to your friend
When you charged up the stairs
Screaming “Then one of you must be dead!”

I looked at him, at you,
At the pallid wonder in your eyes
When I took that first step
Backward and upward and out
Into the thinning air,
Felt the blank relief of weightlessness.

I floated softly onto the stage
Into a play with trumpets.
Only a rehearsal, the theatre empty.
At a signal from a bald man,
The chorus held its final note.
I had arrived.
They relaxed and the purple curtain fell.

Why do poets and photographers love fleeting things?
Angled shafts of sunlight piercing a mass
of clouds. A rainbow flashing from dragonfly wings.
Water drops beading like shards of glass.

The fluttering shape of a sycamore’s shade.
The sun sinking into its reflection
In a purple bay.  Smoke’s shadow. The rayed
Curve of a finger reaching for perfection.

Whatever churns, bursts, rocks, flies,
Foams, flickers, roils, evades
In pigments of impermanent dyes
We try to fix before it fades

Once I mourned the endless dying  
Of here and now, the present always past
Elegized each moment, sighing
Beauty is loss and can never last.

But now I think I had it wrong.  In fact
(I learned this from an artist’s eye)
Fleeting beauty reappears faster than we react,
At the speed of a daydream flashing by.

All around, light coalesces into form,
Form explodes into light,
And we live lavishly inside this storm
If we can learn to see it right.

Beauty multiplies, tapering, swelling:
Reshaping, reforming, now familiar, now strange.
This gaudy blur in which we’re dwelling
Is the permanence of change.

You can’t really picture the place.  
You don’t recall who was there.

But you remember surprise
That human ashes are not powdery dust,
Apt to disintegrate like snow,
Or soft like bread cast upon the waters.

Dad’s ashes chafed your palms like jagged seeds
As you clutched fistfuls from a plastic purple box
And flung them down a hillside
Somewhere in Little Cottonwood Canyon.

And you remember the feeling of urgency
As you retreated up the hill.
You had motions to go through,
Space to occupy,
A black and white landscape to walk
Among small figures filing along a dirt track
In the airless September heat.

We revel in the artist's gaze.
See us, artist, we say.
Scale us in the geometry of your sight.
Objectify us, break us down
To our vital light,
The zero shade of being,
Our essential black and white.

But what if the figure becomes the ground?
Does the artist’s vision ever come to rest?
Does she halt the eye’s restless turning,
Instead hunger to be seen?  Fathomed?  Expressed
In basic hues, simplified, resolved,
Into the object deconstructed, the mystery solved?

Spotlight and camouflage,
Revelation and disguise:
The chiaroscuro of the artist’s eyes.
Then where does beauty reside?
In our eyes, beholders,
Invited in yet held outside?
Or in the starlight, sunlight,
Lamplight as it plays  
On the seer seen in beauty’s gaze?

The others look at the ground.
They look at the sky.
They watch for a miracle,
Believing that they believe,
Wondering when they will no longer wonder,
Unthinkingly mouthing the New English Bible.

You ignore their designs.
You wait for the moment
When we will forget
The climate in our clothes
And the slaughter on our plates
And the tongues of our elders
And the mystery of what remains
And that light is our order,
Our kingdom is stone
And that love, envy, joy, despair
Are rituals that we cannot unlearn
As we touch and retreat in predictable ways.

The sun burns its vicious circle.
So you lie down to sleep.
You try to go to sleep.
You hope they remember to wake you.
But not too soon.
No, not too soon.

(Villanelle)


It takes patience to wait for the perfect light.
Glance away and the image can disappear.
And sometimes the background isn’t quite right.

The moment missed is like a face out of sight
That against all logic we hope will appear
From around a corner, bathed in perfect light.

Or a pause in the music on a moonlit night
When hesitating lips touch, and love leans near,
But voices whisper that something’s not right.

Technology offers consolation in its sleight
Of hand:  Digitally correct the analog here
And now, counterfeit the perfect light.

Yet we want more than the mastered byte.
We want the flash between the waiting and the souvenir,
The instant when self and spectacle fuse, reality felt right.

And so we hold on to what’s passing out of sight,
The collision between soon and too late, the sheer
Thread connecting to the perfect light
In which the background is precisely right.