There is something about churches—
the sanctuary filling slowly,
brass ***** pipes arrayed like halberds
in a medieval arsenal,
stooped ushers handing out programs
as the congregation
accumulates softly
like snow.

And the pulpit—like a queen
in a hive of wooden pews
all of polished walnut,
stands hushed and expectant.

(I know within that pulpit
there is a place to put cough drops,
a legal pad, second pair of glasses.)

Sanctuaries have a peculiar smell,
redolent of potted lilies,
Youth Dew perfume,
aging hymnals,
the suspired breath
of five hundred faithful
lifting their voices to that soaring
Byzantine dome.

I was glad for your presence that day,
the sound of your marvelous
voice, the warm sense
of your shoulder next to mine.
You cradled a hymnal
benevolently in your hand
as though you were baptizing a child.

"Jesus Christ is risen today, Alleluia!"

I sang more loudly, I suppose,
for gratitude that you were with me.
I held my hymnal with more care,
sang and looked up more hopefully
to that pulpit than I might otherwise
have done on any given Easter.
I prayed more ardently for good things to happen,
thought more kindly of the man
beside me who wouldn’t make room
when we three entered the pew
but stared blandly ahead as if
waiting for an opera to begin.

When the minister spread his arms
in benediction and bade us all go in peace,
we stayed to hear the postlude
and watch the Easter crowd
wind its way to the narthex
and spill out into the boisterous
parade on Fifth Avenue.

I sat there and listened with you
as the organist played his sonorous farewell.
When I was a boy sitting next to you in church,
you might gently pat my thigh
when the organist’s final note
passed through the sanctuary
like a great bird in flight.
You would smile as if to say,
“You made it through the whole service!”

On this Easter, when the hymn began,
and the mighty ***** notes swelled around us
like God’s own voice in song,
it was the thought of your shoulder near mine,
your hands upon the pew,
that halted my singing for a moment,
to let a silent bolt of longing
pass through me
like a solitary dog crossing a road.
Then it was gone, the thought,
but so, too, was your palpable nearness,
the idea of your voice
ringing through the church
like a celebration.

Cardinal couple
at the bird-feeder today,
he all in red,
she in orange-gray.

They’re not like us,
this mismatched pair,
she on the snow below,
he circling in the air.

They never part
but seldom unite,
conjoined by love
and freed by flight.

Sometimes my sky's  the ceiling of a planetarium dome
Enveloping my tiny world'
The moon hangs low-
A lantern for the streets
In our snow globe world.
Contained
Compact
And wrapped in local clouds by day.

Both eyes in play - the vision slips
and now I know the nearest star is countless  miles away
And Alice- like I shrink.
A camera, carried high sees me, my home, my town
Resume their truthful place upon the globe;
A dot, if that, a fleeting speck in time no more.
Look up and up and endless up, beyond the plastic dome
To endless possibilities and none.

Arbiter Elegans*

When we were young,
we pried the cavern's darkness with our eyes,
and every autumn evening
we outlasted even day,
until our shadows blended with the night.

Then we turned away
toward the village where we lived.

For we had hoped that time
had lasted with the years,
had linked us with that past
in some enchanted string of moments
from the first to what would be the last.

Breathlessly we paused outside the cave,
our faces shadowed by its mouth,
our ears straining for her cries
(growing weaker, we surmised,
with every day that aged her).

But in December when,
emboldened by our youth,
we stepped inside the cave
(not half as deep or dark as we had thought),
all we found
was an amber bottle dashed upon a rock.

That was years ago,
and I recall the empty faces of my friends
when we emerged,
and how our footsteps scuffed
and lifted up the dust
in our dismayed retreat
toward home.

Shivering in the tempest of his eye,
go to him, martyred spirit, go
where sleep is like oblivion, pure,
and pain falls from the broken soul.

Washed by the gaze of a dreadful god,
pursued through the years, Io, chaste, unheard,
in the dust of a somnolent world, you
have gone where darkness bathes the naked.

You have traced the silent correspondence,
have seen, smelled, tasted infinity
where life is a distant flower, where
to sleep is to wake in an empty bower.

The touch of a mother's hand upon
your quivering arm, c'est goût Néant;
the life of oblivion for the ravished soul,
the *****, the wine of dreamless sleep.

What the infinitude sought so long?
Where behind confused words
lives unity, crepuscular, deep,
where entropy is order, order is complete?

Now, translated beneath this ground
you may sleep  un sommeil profonde,
undisturbed by setting suns,
still unheard by clamoring men.

Sleep, pious poet, sleep, beneath
the unworried sway of timeless worlds,
where sound, smell, touch, and sight
blend as in a sensed but senseless night.

High upon a basalt cliff,
carpeted round with lily fields
and blanching poppys' lips,
high upon a basalt throne,
Persephone sits.

Frail as lily wands,
lithe as Syrinx songs upon a reed.

And there, below,
grim Sisyphus,
and there the Centaur-sire
spins upon a wheel of fire.

And there, Tantalus sits grinning
mumbling prayers of sin and sinning,
hunkered down to steal the peach
which quickly leaps beyond his reach.

Or there, a hundred weary sisters
with a hundred leaking jugs
and a cistern dry as bone.

High upon the basalt cliff,
still as infant breath upon the air,
Persphone, sits and stares.

You, bright-smiled sun-lover
descend on feet of flesh
past the hundred-headed best,
past the high-court Rhadamanthus.

And the hollow-gazing dead
look up from hollow homes,
and voices from the deep inquire,
"Whither now, oh flesh and bones?"

Come to the window, dear;
listen to the sea-swell
comb its patterns on the sand.

Stand by my side and hear
the clanging of a buoy-bell,
breakers crash upon the strand.

Tonight, then, you and I
may stand and breathe the evening
waiting hopefully to see

the dusk-fire turn to night,
the drunken ***** go weaving
from their holes into the sea.

At Singing Hills*

Down upon the earth, boy,
brushing dirt from broken flints.
The woman, tall, in khaki pants,
slowly stands and squints.

Down upon the earth with
pockets full of stones.

A hundred yards across the land
where knife-grass spears the sand
a bullsnake sleeps in sunlight.

Speak of arrowheads and Utah,
you,
with dignified excitement;
speak of ostrich eggs!

You and I, she'd say,
Galapagos!
Where armored turtles
heave their bulks across the land.

Here Mother Earth lies naked
to her bones.
Flint bones,
in sun as white as lamplight.

With your Thermos cup in hand
talk of arrowheads again—
or Galapagos—
Where giant turtles rule the land!

Quiet is your wrath, little cat. Marsupial-eyed, impassive,
You sit like Rhadamanthus on his terrible throne.
We beneath your crouching glare are
Burdened by your malice—
As you lose interest
In us and
Doze.