Magisterial,
you presided over night,
crouching in a nimbus
of yellow light outside our door.
Indifferent to our approach,
sagacious Buddha,
scourge of crickets.

It is a small dish—
no more than four inches in diameter,
but heavy in the hand
like a too-big coin
or a medal from some county fair.

Gray-blue enamel on copper
with a tiny winter scene:
a trio of white fir trees
their branches painted
like tiny hand-prints
stacked one
upon the other.

And just above them,
two blue snowflakes
in a sea of cool enamel,
this tiny dish of winter.

You bought it on a whim,
I’m sure,
at Wildweed in Aspen
(that Seventies store
cluttered with thick ceramic bowls
and macramé)
some January
when Christmas things
were fifty percent off.

In that annual ritual
when you brought the Christmas
boxes up from the basement,
it was there among
the old glass ornaments
wrapped in decades-old
tissue paper.

It’s too small for candy—
really just a bit of whimsy
for the marble-top
in the living room
or a bedside table.

Now it sits in my kitchen
on an old green
step-back cupboard
all year round.

I will not wrap it in tissue paper
after Christmas.
No, I will not hasten
the cycle of the years
any more than time has done.

I will let my distracted gaze
fall now and then
on that little dish,
with its two blue snowflakes.

And I will feel
with mild surprise
a brief stab of panic
deep in my chest
rise and pass like a shadow
or a memory.

I have not moved form off this porch,
this porch where sunlight falls
in tidy columns
on the overgrown grass below.

I have not moved,
nor have I slept,
but presided silently
over morning’s passing
and the slow, serious rise of the sun.

Neighborhood children,
heavy-headed, awkward,
kick a ball and scream
across the courtyard
where a lone gray boulder sits
and rows of houses crowd about.

The giant oak near the trailer park
casts shadows on a sleeping dog.

A tank-topped girl calls from the house
to the squinting boy
with a jar in his hand.

At the creek,
children squat with sticks in hand
and **** a dying frog.

Without a thought,
I have noted mother calls
rise and fall across the dell.

I have watched the giant oak
with one, great wooden arm
impale the earth and hold it still.
I have heard the mongrel pup whine
by the barbed wire fence.

And when the sun is tangled in the trees
I shall doze in the failing light
or replace this chair against the wall
where the wood is notched and gray.

We three sat
on the stoop
on Thursday night
eating watermelon.
Our Georgian brick
building
crouched behind us,
the front door held open
by someone’s flip-flop.

The day had been hot,
and when it began
to rain,
the sidewalk steamed
with every drop

until there were no more
drops but the evening’s
deafening applause
and silver spears of rain
shattering themselves
on the wet-black street.

We piled our melon rinds
in mixing bowls
and all stood
wordlessly
to go.

We had talked that night
as students do;
ambling about,
trying new things out:
Pater, Pound,
Benjamin, Foucault.

Distracted now and then,
we watched a desperate moon
clamber gently
up an arching oak
and jump
in the sad, still way
that moons
so often do.

In the silences
of our conversation,
the locusts stirred their thrum,
shrill and urgent,
talking one to the other—
or one to all—
in the noisy communion
that is a Virginia night.

Nighttime’s business
had halted, though,
to let the sky be unburdened.

In the rain’s roar,
our watermelon all but gone
and Baudelaire
(for the moment)
spent,
we'd grown unexpectedly
silent
as if to note
something sacred
in the night.

Impressive in his houndstooth coat,
he is noticeably provoked
by crimes against Wallace Stevens.

Beneath his office window
a student meandering to class
takes a twig
of boxwood in his grasp and,
without a moment's thought,
casually plucks it off.

Seizing upon an epiphany,
(or moment of regret)
the Professor turned and said to me:
“We shall all be plucked in time,
or driven down beneath the tread
of farmer feet, in mud as red
and thick as congealing blood!
Driven down like grain
by men with callused hands.”

The world's weight now suspired,
he turned his gaze
to the walkways below,
signalling, I surmised, that I should go.

Death,
I had to concede
is an undignified affair:
random and incoherent in its sweep.
We are naked, riven,
utterly alone, and strewn,
once reaped,
into the soil that was our home.

But not the tall, brown men
of the whispering halls,
where fates are drawn and snipped,
(where capacious noses lightly drip)—
they are plucked with the tenderness of frost,
tucked into filing drawers,
and lost.

When the late-day sun
sent a shaft of light
through my old screen door,
I saw the places
where the paint has peeled
(such felicitous light green paint!)
and the eye-hook latch
shows signs of rusting.

I changed the screen
not long ago,
yet three rough holes
disrupt its hazy plane
like insects in a web.

Outside, the autumn air
troubles the tired green
canopies of elms and oaks.

Summer lingers in little ways:
The blue cotton rug
inside our threshold
sits warm beneath a
slanting square of sun;
the lawn outside is dry
for want of watering.

Soon the breeze grows cool,
and when I go to
shut the door I see
a single strand of  gold
the wind has found to tease,
held fast for the moment
by the ragged screen.

You left today,
and now I feel
the autumn’s chill
more deeply in my bones.

From the scaffold
we see most clearly.

From these heights I know the stature
of all the works and days of man;
and from here, enthroned by these two beams,
straddling these two worlds,
I see the oyster heaps of cities
where the children we shall leave
assume our places
at the cafe, brothel, cathedral,
and here.

We upon the scaffold
bid whispered farewells
to our accusers
only for the instant
time takes to reunite us.

And with the iron descent of ruin
and the silencing of the mind
and the extinction of the soul
is struck the next toll
of the ceaseless funerary bell.

These are the empty visions
of men sentenced to go before the rest—
who shall not call back from the dripping caverns
that light is dancing on the farthest wall.