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.

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.

It is January, I know,
but there is warmth in me for now
as if Spring had shaken off low clouds
and washed away these ragged heaps of snow.

It will pass,
this early bloom of light,
and we shall turn to trudging, once again,
the icy paths we walk from car to house.

Like that fugitive queen,
you leave Winter in your wake.
Wield that weather gently, love:
You bring a Spring to us who urge you on.

Angry
nuthatch
in the maple today.
All Confederate gray
except for that russet shirt
and tiny Zorro mask.
“Yank!” He called, insulted,
as I trudged by,
garbage in hand.
Then he was gone,
in the brambles
of a barren
spirea.

That thing you gave me—
I have it still
all these years later.
I found it the other day,
half-hidden, like a folded sweater
in a forgotten trunk.

You were young then,
lovely, haggard
like an orchid softly wilting
in unforgiving heat.
Wasting amazon,
pain deep within your legs,
resting like a queen
on a stone sarcophagus.

When the boy read to you,
did you hear his stumbling words,
from the frayed blue book?
Or was your troubled mind
wandering elsewhere,
on some trackless, stubbled field?

He felt only the touch of your hand
on his hair, the warm pulse of your breath
on his forehead and eyelashes.

In the church balcony:
Water Music.
Fingers stretched above the keys,
pipe ***** bright and sonorous.
Down below, the congregants
gazed upon the pulpit
awaiting the benediction.
Soul souring,
heart filling.
God was great.

Shimmering like Artemis in her glade,
you stood reflected in a mirror
on the closet door,
gowned in emerald satin—
a last look at makeup
before he calls upstairs
that the car is ready.

You smiled
as you turned to go,
fabric swishing against your legs.
Uncertain memory insists you smiled,
if only momentarily to unclench
the grip upon your windpipe,
the blunt pain deep inside your femur,
the dark edge arcing at the horizon
in your dreams or waking gaze.

In that still stratum of existence,
that lilting stream of secret thought
where no son or daughter enters in,
there the soul walks with worry
day and night
lost in a whispered discourse.

We must have all bathed
in that gentle stream,
its silent water lapping at our feet.
When you looked up, distracted,
as if from reading
Donne or Herbert
your ruminations
cannot have been
unsensed.

That thing you gave me,
that dark gift,
I bear like a secret
beneath my winter coat.
I know you never meant it
to be mine.

But the glade was darkening
when you walked that field
and your gaze was fixed
worriedly
on a shimmering
in the distant woods.

Merely
two turgid leaves
of purple—
more haiku
than sonnet.
Yet, like Caesar’s
Tyrian robe,
there is grandeur
in you.

How odd that entropy is time’s measure—
that through the dissolution of the world
we know, time’s arrow swiftly flies its course—
irrevocable and unrelenting.
Yet isn’t there a certain artfulness
to time’s advance? The ineluctable,
the crease of wrinkle in the lover’s cheek,
a river’s tireless sculpting of its banks?
In all the scything, striving, dying, all
the loss, the grief, the thievery of years,
there is design of a kind—a subtle mind—
deaf to prayers though always true to mission.
Though time has swept us, love, in its advance,
there’s music there, I think, by which to dance.