Last year's version of the mind-body problem:
my mind gives orders that my body won’t obey.
It’s a problem.

The body’s warranty has expired and
spare parts are scarce.  Plastic tubes
To help me drain have become part of my day.
So there’s still a will.  But sometimes no way.

I am now my sister’s age when she died.  
And some nights
as I lie down in darkness
there’s a moment of wondering
could this be the night
of the Great Reckoning
when everything I’ve said and done
goes mute and I am gone.

And crawling over me like a slow stain
is dread that everything important in life
has already happened. I remember some days  
less than my dreams.

But friend, not this tone!
Let us write a history of now.
Body and soul, stand up and shout
“Baseball road trip!”

Car:  check.  Best friend:  check.  Nostalgia for a simpler
time.  We can fake that one.
The red zigzags on our map turn into places:
Six ballparks in a week.
Detroit haze, gasping Chicago wind,
Milwaukee self-serve micro brew
Cincinnati chili and watering eyes,
Cleveland’s defiant self-love,
Pittsburgh’s Primanti brothers monstrosity sandwich—
Burger, coleslaw, and fries on toast.

The American dream tastes like fast food,
But the mystery lives between the lines.
Thwack of fastball into catcher’s glove,
Whock! of line drive into the gap,
Ball rolling free across the green
While the runner speeds for home.
Home.

Let’s keep going, friend.
There’s another bridge up ahead and
a ballpark’s lights shining somewhere in the dusk
of the upper Midwest and the open road
unrolls toward the setting sun.

A long time ago I tried to write
A love poem to a girl of my dreams.
I was burning and I was burning
For her. Instead, it seems

I wrote something about amnesia
And forgetting how to feel.
I wanted to win a dark mistress’s heart
Only the burning was real.

Or a different story:
The gulf between objects and desire.
Like the soul in Emerson’s tale,
We can never touch our beloved with fire.

Or loss. A long-legged beauty
Disappeared into echoes that I can’t explain.
Still burning with thirst
I wrote about ashes and pain.

Then I met you on a blooming campus path.
You had sinewy curves and a powerful flame
In your eyes that left me burning
To give your pleasure a secret name.

But it turned into a different plot.
You told me I set something inside you free.
It was new and I was still learning.
I told you, “Come burn with me.”

I think I know what the problem was.
I needed to learn a language from you,
The wordless speech that tongue teaches tongue,
Eye glints to eye, that skin lets through.

And our bodies coiled together
And your brown skin and my pale skin
Entangled in the heat of unity.
The burning flowed from outside to in.

There has to be a word for this,
Something enduring, strong.
Come close, I’ll try to whisper it.
Though I might get it wrong.

Forgetting is the only clarity.*

It was a day of forgetting.
No unquiet dreams or
casual reunions with the dead
who wander the halls of sleep,
the bodies of someone else’s loss.
No ghosts in the gazebo.
No echoes in the fading light.

Exiting sleep’s empty waiting room,
She woke. Blue sky blinked into her eyes.  
The room’s climate began to clear.
There was writing on the wall.
Old fragments came to closure.
The windows slowly turned to mirrors.

She fiddled. She soared.  
She played with her ancestors’ building blocks.
She lent a myth to god.
She stood in a garden with five black stones.
She foretold an eclipse,
Burned the witch of winter,
Stepped in the same river twice.

The moment froze.
Then there it was.
The compound inviolate paradox
at the heart of things,
the answer flickering in light and shade,
to the sound of a child’s voice,
then the roaring wind.
She chuckled as it faded to a point of light
then vanished, like the picture on an old TV,
Like the moon shrinking into the alarm clock’s face.

Her breath brewed clouds above her forehead.
She sat aloof in the empty air,
Alone in the immense morning,
At rest in this inviolable disconnection,
the clear cold innocence of now.

My skin remembers your fingers.
My calm remembers your care.
I loved once and was loved.
Read this to me when I'm not there.

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.

I stand at the flagstone fountain in the park and gaze across the street at the red brick bungalow where I lived as a child. Am I supposed to intone something? Summon a spirit? Or perhaps I’m the one who’s been summoned? Ghost of myself.

Set into the steep hillside, the house faces west. A boarded-up plate glass window makes it blind in one eye. In the summer, from that window, I watched postcard sunsets. I also learned watching there that the world was TV.  You watched it. It didn’t see you.

On the opposite wall, on a sofa, our family watched on a 15 inch portable Sears black and white with the collapsible rabbit ears men first walk on the moon.  We welled with pride in the space program. I ate Space Food Sticks and drank Tang.

Around to the side, behind the rose bushes, through that small basement window was my bedroom when I was 10. A tiny square of sun on the brightest summer day was all the daylight that ever got in.  There I first felt inside the base of my spine a small hard coldness. The night before, my three best friends had slept over to celebrate my 11th birthday.  Tonight I was alone.  The coldness grew.  It tendril’d into an icy tingle that radiated up my spine and through my arms like a metal cage of disappointment.  

Years later I learned the name of depression. But then it was just  cold inside my spine. And the cold spoke to me. “Davy, this is how it’s gonna be. It’s just you and me. Make room.” “You’re wrong,” I said.  “You’ll see. I’ll meet Ruby Tuesday.” I turned up the transistor radio and pulled the music close to me.

Through that bay window just above, the dining room table, my father and draft-age brother late on summer nights had it out over Vietnam.  

“Immoral, unnecessary, we should not be there,” my brother said.
“You know what happens if we’re not there?” says dad. I was in Korea. When the communists took over, in came the guys with the clipboards. Anyone who spoke English or taught school or owned a business was lined up against a wall and shot.
Yeah, well, we should not be … dying … bombs…bloodbath…reds.

Drowsing I no longer heard the words, only rising and falling pitch, a duet of bitterness, anger, wistfulness, probing for connection And into the night as darkness took hold and the voices merged with the rising and falling rhythm of cricket sounds, harmonizing like sleep.

The first time I saw Los Angeles,
it was after midnight.
Descending from Cajon pass and
entering the chaos of light and
the formless poetry of traffic,
I thought of Ezra Pound’s line from near the end of the Cantos:
“I cannot make it cohere.”
“It” is the most important word in that sentence.
In language we can conjure wholes too big for us to comprehend.
Push hard enough, and names fade and pronouns are all we have left.
So what is this place?

We are travelers all our lives.
Like the sun and moon, never come to rest.
When the body stops, the motion survives.

Time twists inside me.  I buried two wives,
their love spent on an endless road.  My quest  
consumed them, traveling all their lives.

Profligate summer mocks my waning drives.
Riddles of the road languish here, unguessed,
where my body stops. The motion survives

In my art’s vigor, you say, derives
force from what now seems the bitter  jest
that we are travelers all our lives.

My friend, before the end arrives
There must be time to seek again the west
beyond the sunset, where motion survives

in the dying sun, blazing, as it revives  
inhuman tongues that said it best
that we are travelers all our lives.
When the body stops, the motion survives.

I met a woman
brutal in her mercy.

Her embrace was a clinch
to prevent hard blows.
She pulled me close to push me away.
Seeing my nakedness
she leant me a dream
of chainmail and shield.
Taking love from me she gave a reprieve
to a mind resigned to the slow death of feeling.

Ignoring my words she heard
my faint silent heartbeat and
understood that it was music
too quiet for the world to hear
and turned it up louder
than I could stand.
I wept in my deafness
as she danced.

Staring at the first cup of coffee
Reminded me of my favorite color,
Darkness, where for so long,
Shapeless I grasped after form
Through unending nights.
Adding cream, I see the mocha
Of your skin
And my shape molds against it
As the sun rises.

I thought this park would stay the same
since I first set foot in its early green,
when it was new.  I didn’t know its name.  

Now the baseball diamond’s seen its last game.
They sodded the basepaths and took out the screen.
A field without a backstop just isn't the same.

The stone fountain sits dry in its frame
of red cement.  Once water gurgled clean,
and tasted new like a secret name.

This sloping dirt path was how I came
Home from school.  It was paved by a machine
When I thought this park would stay the same.

The box elder with the split trunk’s now maimed.
Half of it’s gone. I used to hide between
Its arms. It gave refuge I could not name.

Yet the vision of a place time can’t claim--
Spared in a quiet corner, unseen--
Persists.  So I dream this park stayed the same,
Though now it no longer remembers my name.

Dance was the shape her body gave to music.

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.

In this place
The air is so dry that water sulks.
The sky is a viscous brown mosaic.
The sulfurous fumes of old suffering linger.

A woman stares as if trying to unsee creation.
Words on a man’s tongue sound
like rhythmic coughing.
At the only stoplight
the crosswalk sign flashes “Don’t waltz.”

Strangers recoil from me
as if from an embarrassing stain.

People stream to the town square
for some indecipherable ritual.
Probably a funeral for the sun
or a snake oil sale.

Welcome to humankind’s true garden.
Not paradise but a place of desolation,
and what comes after is not exile but striving
and getting the hell out.

So long, mom and dad.

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.

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

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.

3
Shrouded in the night’s thick fabric,
Some who fear infinity
Believe a dark door
In the sky will open
And heaven will empty itself
And everything they have ever lost
Will come back to them.

4
Through pinpricks
In the vault of night,
The desires of sleeping souls
Seep upward into a second sky
Where they flare into infinitude
Like our longing for God.

5
Beneath a solitary cloud,
I try to imagine
Its hunger for solid form.
It is trapped in its becoming,
Blown along in a captivity of chaos.
I weigh the blessings of confinement
Inside the body’s slower entropy.

6
After the casseroles from anxious neighbors
And the flowers stopped arriving
And a last aging aunt blubbered goodbye,
I left the silent house,
Drove to the foothills
And began to climb.
Atop your favorite peak,
I opened the urn
And gave your ashes to the sky.
Will I ever stop wondering where you’ve gone?
The light was changing
As I descended into
The mountain's immense shadow.

7
You dance with me
While the wind gathers
In the portrait where you
Fix your hair in a bun,

Your back arched to the camera,
Your clothes on the floor
Where you dance with me
While the wind gathers.

You watch the sky
As you dance with me
While the gathering wind
Tears holes in the clouds.

We hear something final
In the gathering wind
Rushing through tall trees
As you dance with me.

Wherever you are
The wind gathers
While a dance goes on.
I still hear the music.

The course of a cloud is not my course.
The void of the sky is not my void.
The shifting wind’s not blowing in my direction.
Life is no longer up in the air.

Today the lines in my hand are my map.
All roads lead everywhere.
Today there is no walking away,
Only walking.

9

In the garden hard with frost
sits an old man with furrowed eyes
staring at old decorations
dangling from branches
overhung with snow.

His forced breath sinks into fog.
He cannot feel
the rising of a warmer wind
or the furrowed ground
beneath his feet
poised to ooze life.

I am afraid of his eyes.
I turn away when he looks up
at the waves of geese returning,
thawing the ground with their shadows.

The poet frames the void.
The critic voids the frame.

The table was set.
The morning was fine.
The world lay reflected
in two glasses of wine.

An empty plate
reflected sunshine,
The morning compressed
in two glasses of wine.

What did she see
in undulations of wine?
Were the shapes a portent?
Was there a design?

Were the glasses a mirror
or shadowy sign?
Perhaps they were more
than just glasses of wine.

She and a friend
sat down to dine.
Their reflections drank deeply
from two glasses of wine.

Dance is the shape that body gives to music.
As your dream unfolds, words fly backwards at the speed of sleep.
He disliked the word “stalker.” He preferred “scientist of solitude.”
Leaving a message to his former self, written in pills.
His muse turned out to be mere longing in ordinary darkness.
This was the choice:  hear the music or feel the cold at the base of your spine.
I asked your heart, “Sit next to me?” You apostrophized to a tree.
Order cannot contain itself. There is always remainder. Flecks float in sunlight.
Stop laughing at my jokes and let me get on with this suicide note.
You stared at a white index card, waiting for a prayer to appear
A rhetoric of purpose is a philosophy of decay.
Keeping darkness at bay with the failing light of poetry.

She invited me into her palace of art,
Where everything signified something else.
She wore a silvery gown,
Covered with a million miniature mirrors.
I was badly dressed.

“Beautiful lady, be my love
and heal my soul.
My life is fragments.
Make me whole.”

“I made this place to stand apart,
A window to a world purer, deeply felt.
Everything here is for you but my heart.
Don’t get the idea that it’s going to melt

Later on.”  Music played.
Nirvana. Or maybe it was “Deacon Blues.”
Twisted letters carved
On doorknobs offered clues
To someone else’s mystery.

“Then be my muse,
Teach me the language of clouds
The coded words on the ceiling’s vault.”

A digital river flowed beneath
A winding stair down to an analog sea.
I asked “Are these ‘caverns measureless to man’?”
“Yes,” she said, “But not to woman.”

I wandered through room after room,
One printed, one painted, one sculpted, one
Paneled with friezes like the blazing tomb
Of an epic queen deified by the sun.

I saw a near-empty room with a single chair.
The light defined its form,
its form escaping into light.
“Is this real or a photo?”
“Yes,” she serenely replied.

I came to two doors.  One said Discipline,
One Desire. “How can I possibly choose?”
“They lead to the same place,” she said.

What was real and what wasn’t flowed together
“You’re starting to figure it out.”

The innocence of a woman’s arched back,
And the wisdom of children.  
The solitude of a lonely pier.

I knelt and I thanked her “Was all this for me?”
“I made this to give away. Not just for you.
What have you learned?  Let’s review.

“Art is a shield
Against falling glass. Art healed
My divided mind, which used to devour
Itself, giving away its power.

Art is hunger, a piercing lack.
Art is a ride on a gull’s back.

Art is a dodge, the as of the mirror.
Art destroys, callous clearer
Of old order.  Art is a dance,
a surrender to chance.

Art is not all seduction and fire
Or tethered to your desire
(Except when it is).  
Beyond the dazzle of you and me,
Art is a failing light for learning how to see.”

I said “Now I understand less than before.”
“Then you’re ready.  
Imagine starry ways beyond these walls.
Use an innocent eye.  
Confusion calls.”

I never saw her again.
But it was enough
to start small.  

She tempted me like an empty page.
From this immense vacuum, I write.

Seeing someone every day
is not seeing them,
not in the way of knowing
ourselves, marked by a milestone on a rocky trail
or a spring growing back with azaleas and pollen
and a canopy of elms.

Instead the confetti of moments we’ve traveled together
whirl into the patternless vortex of now
and we don’t know where we find ourselves.
  
Yet I thought of you the other day
and a painting you gave to me when we first loved.
It showed a man diving into the ocean toward mermaids
Who sat on an island, watching.

Next to the image were words from a Jerry Butler song,
“Isle of the Sirens,” about a ship’s crewman lured by temptation.  
"The voices got louder
They sing beautiful things in my ear
I must go to that island of women
I must see these creatures I hear
Love is blind and desires have no fear."
The captain warns him that surrendering
to the siren song is a betrayal.
"Keep course, cried the Captain
Ignore them and let them be
Straight ahead, cried the Captain
Set on by and stay free
Remember laws of mutiny"
The man jumps anyway.
"'Old man, you know nothing
Of temptation
And desires are heaven to me.'
And off he leaped into the sea."

When you showed this to me, at first I thought I
was the man, giving in to temptation.
Only later did I understand that you were the man,
A black woman hearing a siren song
from a white man who lured her with desire and love.
We know the fate of those who leap at the sirens’ lure.
You broke the laws of mutiny.  

Something in my daily cogito has kept this memory close,
reminds me that you leapt
And you’re still here.

Here we are now, in the time of COVID-19,
alone together, shut out of the world,
sleeping in each other’s shadow
bored by each other’s demons,
walking past the blank of each other’s  mirrors.
But I still hear that song.  
Can you still hear it, love?  
Would you still make the leap?

The language I learned from you
was the wordless speech
that tongue teaches tongue
that eye flicks to eye
that skin lets through

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.

for Richard, the boy who narrated life*

Today, leaves are falling.
“One day Aaron will watch the falling leaves.”
The first day of school arrives.  
“One day Champ’s mom will take him to school.”

Life is the story of life, says the narrator.

Life expands. The story lengthens.
The intertwined threads begin to pull apart.

Life is surface and sheen,
laughter, tears, opaque signs.
The story strains after fictive frames,
the hero’s epiphany, the villain’s inner pain,
and undreamt creatures beyond human sense.

And so myth and magic
give form to stories
that we no longer star in.  
New worlds take shape
where the story creates its own life,
an escape from "the shock of recognition."

In time the threads converge again.  
Life’s pattern breaks and needs a new plot.
The stories yield their human meaning—
maybe we were in them all along.

The story ends and life goes on.
Life ends and the story goes on.

N.  N is for neurologist.  
What does the neurologist say?
“Nothing seems to be wrong.
Your net recall seems normal.
You seem to remember most nouns and the news.
Nothing serious,
No need to worry.”

I don’t quite remember driving here.
This is Bethesda, right?
And your name is…?

P.  P is for psychologist.
The P. is silent.
So is the psychologist.
I talk and talk.
My energy level is high today,
even though I got no sleep last night.  
I want to write a poem and run a partial marathon.
I love people.
People are so beautiful.
“Only connect,” said E.M. Forster.
Am I talking too much?
How does that make me feel?
Just great!  Not like yesterday,
when I wanted to jump into the Potomac
from Key Bridge.
P is also for Potomac.
The psychologist speaks.
I need a new pill.

E. E is for endocrinologist.
What does the endocrinologist say?
“Eat. You’re an enigma.
You are losing weight.
We don’t know why.
We’ve checked everything
and can’t find evidence
of enemies in your endocrine system.
Enjoy some eclairs, eggplant, eggs benedict.
Life is short, endulge!  
Hopefully not too short.

O. O is for oncologist.
Oh.
Oh oh.

Summer morning.
Recrossing the borderline from the afterlife,
the dreamer is expelled from sleep, the dream lost.
I am a dream’s shadow,
heavy with transition, jagged from sleep.
Light gathers me from every room I have ever slept in
onto the shrinking island of the bed.

Someone cues the poetry. Unquiet lines.
The past was worse than you thought,
voices say.  Your life is a weighted skin.
Stop swimming against the tide of loss.
Sink.

Yet gloom is porous.
From the sky’s cracked mosaic,
Daybreak seeps in.
The light reassembles familiar objects,
which replace mere longing in ordinary darkness.

The things of the world resist but return
to radiance, resume the work of existing.
We are all day laborers.
It's my shift. Summon the coffee.
The world yawns before me.
And I am, therefore (I think).

Hardened to experience
Like gum beneath a chair,
I cannot explain
This lasting hunger for simple fictions.

Yet prompt me as you tried so long ago
To imitate the joker in the balcony
Who shouts “I’m gonna be sick!”
And launches a bucketful of mushroom soup
Over the railing,
To this day I forget my only line.  
The gestures, too.  
And the sound effects?  
The mind’s ear can’t hear them anymore,
Let alone vibrate to them in Sensurround.

But I’m still slouching down in familiar dark,
Feet stuck to the floor, waiting for the previews to end,
Hoping that a moving picture conjures
Something whose absence has become
So powerful that I begin to think
It’s really the presence of something else.

The aroma of our time together
So many years ago lingers
Like the faint odor of mushroom soup.

The story began one night in the dark
when most curious minds were asleep.
Sitting silently, only fingers tapping the keys,

“You tempted me like an empty page,” he wrote,
longing for a response of immediacy
that would fill his mind with more words,
the only thing he took comfort in.

She stepped aside from the voices
at her gathering to read his message.
“Emptiness,” she wrote back, “lives in the mind,
the habit of looking for what’s lost.

There is no zero in nature.
Let me tempt you with fullness instead.
Come and see what I see, and share what is there.”

As she sent the message, she swallowed deeply
knowing that what she offered was not quite a lie
but more of an unfulfilled desire.

“I can give you what I never had,” she thought.
Her mind wandered, filling
with all the ways that only emptiness can.

He wasn’t sure what she was offering him.
Whatever it was, he longed for it.
Her words flooded him with a feeling he couldn’t name.
Love? Desire?  Intoxication? Yes.

As the sun rose, he took no notice of fatigue, thirst, hunger.
He forgot the empty days,
the time spent looking in the mirror,
counting the lost years.
He began again to write.

Salt Lake City, 2015*

Like a tourist in my own childhood,
I wander the neighborhood of my youth.
It’s not quite a pilgrimage, as
pilgrims know what they’re looking for.

I stand at the flagstone fountain in the park
and gaze across the street
at the red brick bungalow
where my family lived until I was 13.

Am I supposed to intone something?
Summon a spirit? Or perhaps I’m the one
who’s been summoned. Ghost of myself.

On this spot, there’s the illusion of level ground,
but here at the northwest corner of this Victorian
mountain city, the ground slopes in every direction
if you walk a few yards. North up to the Wasatch,
east up to the Wasatch, south more gently but up again,
to the Wasatch, and west sharply down to the valley floor.

Set into the hillside, the house faces west.
A boarded-up plate glass window
makes it blind in one eye.
In the summer, from that window,
we could see postcard sunsets,  
fiery light sinking into the Great Salt Lake.
In winter the gray stasis of inversion.

The old brass address plate—61—still hangs
Slightly crooked on the molding below the attic dormer.
The steep cement steps to the wide front porch
look worn by nostalgia.

My grandparents bought this house in 1938,
and sold it to my parents in 1957, so dad,
the English professor, could walk to work
at the U., a half block away.  I was 1.

Double exposure.  I can’t separate this view
From old photos and recollections.

There to the right on the parking strip,
I once hid under a giant cardboard box
when I knew my sister was walking back from campus.  
As she got close, I jumped out,
causing a satisfyingly chilling scream.  
She tried her best to be furious at me,
but we were both laughing too hard.

1946:  Dad in black and white stands
to the left of the porch’s north column in his graduation gown,
his bachelor’s degree delayed seven years
by a Mormon mission to Scotland and World War II.

1955: all my siblings and all the children
of my mother’s sisters posed on the sweeping cement stairs
for an iconic black and white portrait. Only one missing:
Me.  Not born yet.  All those cousins
Sitting on my steps before I existed.  
There must be a word in some language
for the feeling that gave me. I never could name it.

I start up the alley to the north side
to take a lap around the place.
The brick’s discolored and damaged
from a half-century’s growth of ivy,
recently stripped away, like skin where a tattoo’s been removed.
A picture I took in 1985 shows ivy completely covering the dim brick.

At night, a car turning up this alley would cast crazily
dancing lights  on the ceiling
of my pitch-dark basement bedroom,
through this little porthole-size window.
My heart  would race, knowing it meant my parents were home.

The cement walk alongside the house is crumbling
and has started to melt into the wild grass.

The next window, at the landing of the basement stairs
is where a black widow lived, encased in the space between
inner and outer panes. I used to study the red hourglass
on its abdomen, and tried to draw it.
Couldn’t get it right. Was better at artillery.

In the back, against this wall, an old radiator was standing, waiting for removal  after home improvements.
It toppled over and landed on my brother’s foot.
Crutches for weeks.  Bad luck, but maybe it inoculated
him.  He’s still never had a broken bone.

Here behind the garage, the old crabapple tree still stands,
nurturing its sour but highly flingable fruit.
At its base a hamster lies buried.

The little side yard on the south looks the same,
though the old white trellis that I used to climb
when I was so tiny it would support my weight is gone.

Back to the ***** at the front of the house.
Leaving for school in the morning I would
leap this ***** in a single bound.

The old place looks creased and sleepy.
It doesn’t remember who I am,
is starting to fade into the past.
It’s only about half here.
The rest is memory and desire.

Old selves die easily.
They whine their superseded demands
And the winds of change
Blow buildings down on them.

Or slide into a warm bath of contentment
And gasp out their last as the water drains,
Marooning them like bathtoys of despair.

One has expired in my arms.
His face turns to smoke
Like a ghost beginning to form.

Tenderly, I drag him to the backyard
To hide him with the others.
I mark where they’re buried
So oblivion knows where to find them.

A form of alchemy
By which
Emotional pain
Is transmuted
Into verbal pleasure.

Patiently waiting for the perfect light.
Glassy lake, wind, clouds, perfection’s near
as the moment dwindles into night.

Captured moments prove that you’re alive, a height
of feeling between depths of time and fear
that living casts only imperfect light.

But the moment missed is like a face out of sight
that against all logic you hope will appear
from around a corner, framed by the night.

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

Yet you want more than the remastered byte.
You want the flash between waiting and souvenir,
Self and spectacle fused, reality felt right.

And so you wait for what’s passing out of sight,
the collision between soon and too late, sheer
threads connecting to the perfect light
before the moment dwindles into night.

(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.

(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.

Fiery light from a dying star
Cools against your mocha thigh.
Desire formed like fingers
Rustles your hair’s dark light.

Body to body and breath to breath,
We are here and nowhere else.
Unposted selves,
Love without likes,
Hands without keyboards,
Voices in air,
The absence of absence.

“We make our meek adjustments,
    Contented with such random consolations
    As the wind deposits in slithered and too ample pockets.”

               Hart Crane, “Chaplinesque”

A footstool in the desert.
A napkin in the netherworld.
A coffee stain in the margin.
Perfumed remains.
Systematic garnish.
Dorothy Stratten climbing Mt. Suribachi.
My late father’s toenail clippers.
Pale clouds over Slauson Avenue on the day after the L.A. riots.
A rhetoric of purpose.
A philosophy of decay.
A poem written to an audience of one.

©David Adamson 2015

“Up above my head
I hear music in the air
I really do believe
I really do believe
there's a Heaven somewhere”
--Rhiannon Giddens

“Is that all there is?”
--Peggy Lee*

An old philosopher told me this:

“About heaven.
Let’s say there’s more than one.
There’s the one where souls
are lurid with perfection,
piled into bliss,
dreaming of change.

“There’s the one people search for
to fit the story they tell themselves.
I looked for it.  I watched the sky.
I found only words.  Blue sky is
a blank page.  Clouds are garish metaphors.

“Then there’s one that follows you.
Don’t look for it. You can’t find it.
It’s not a place or a path.
It dances at the edge of things
like old photos or a young face
that lives remembered in its older one,
an eternal moment always at hand
trailing like a thought balloon,
a shadow cast by nothing,
forever unfolding, never now.”

1.  Lying in the Dark

I stare toward empty heaven
which darkness fills
and I lie down,
become the horizon,
axis for the night to spin.  
The past was worse than you thought,
voices say, and poetry won’t keep us quiet.
I float toward sleep
on a tide of loss,
drifting toward morning,
beached by sunrise,
stranded in the empty skin of another day.

2. The Reappearing World

New light assembles the same objects
and forgives mere longing
in ordinary darkness.
Gloom is porous.
Dawn seeps in.
Things of the world resist
but return to radiance.
There are voices, laughter, faint at first.
Love like laughter comes when it will.
Warm flecks of morning dance in a square of sunlight.

Dear David:

We are deeply gratified that you gave us the opportunity
to read your poems.  Notice that we say “opportunity”
rather than “submission,” for truly you graced us with works
of such enduring power, so sublime, so transcendent,
that our humble words scarce can adequately praise
the sacred privilege of reading them.

Seldom, no, never has human experience been so distilled,
so purified, so exalted, yet so exposed
in all its paradox, its shades and sunbursts,
shouts and silences, the hiding places redolent of inner light,
as in these timeless works.  

A calm breeze from the desert’s edge at dusk,
the chatter of a mockingbird at dawn,
the rumble and crash of a hidden waterfall,
the laughter of a child unseen in a cool wood’s shade,
emanate so intensely from the shapes of these letters
that our faith in the power of language to evoke reality
has been nourished and restored to its proper place.

However, we regret to inform you
that your poems do not meet our needs at this time,
which are for relevant poems for the upcoming
theme issue on Hammer Toes.

We hope you will consider us for future opportunities.

Sincerely,

The editors of ******* Quarterly

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?

At night rise, to the buzz of my son’s blood,
I wake and blow aboriginal dust from my lungs,
Get up and take a turn around the house.

The place has gotten cold.
This ****-eyed family – good God, they are helpless.
I tried to help by leaving things behind,
Like this prayer on the wall
About the timelessness of beauty.
And did you find the poem
About Freud and mountain climbing?
All they do is wail privately
And try to pass it off as singing.

My son sleeps like a chessmaster,
Shocked into resignation.
He dreams about me,
And his dreams are riddled with light
And longing for the past.
Such nocturnal naiveté.

But he knows the stars
And because, like the ancient Greeks,
He can follow them home,
He will leave this place before it leaves him.

This house gets smaller all the time.
Still, the furniture breathes quietly,
And the dancers in the tapestry sway
Though faded by the sun.

The dust from my breath settles down in layers.
Pale light silvers the living room mirror.
My steps leave footprints before each foot falls.
The footprints lead back to my door.

It is time to lie down.
Soon my son will wake up,
And shake off the ashes of sleep.
I don't live here any more.
My death will begin again.

A man in a field walks through a storm.
Snowflakes on his eyelashes blur his vision.
A man in a study believes in snow,
believes in the truth of snow.

A man leaves traces as he walks.
His tracks ornament the field’s blank.
He meanders, doubles back, evading,
leaves imprints that the snow erases.
A man walks. The snow falls.  

In a study, a man devotes himself to snow.
He reads from the book of snow.
He composes wintry axioms.
“Snow:  Atmospheric water vapor frozen into ice crystals
that drop on a walking man’s eyelashes
or lie blank in an unwritten field.

“Snow is a conflict,
a confusion, a yearning.
Letters are desire.
Margins are melancholy.”

The storm disappears.
A man squints at blurred words,
Resumes writing,
Shaking snow from the page.