The daffodils sang a  
song in the churchyard.

So did the early robins
scratching among the graves.

I thought I  heard the wind say:
“It’s time! Rise!”

sublime pebbles beyond eyes
and mind thrown but falling
too near. My want of seeing what
I already guess, but still find
out of reach, certainty muted,
hinting at truth, recollecting
a sight as if blind, something
explosively central, but
receding like a name fused
into self but futilely grasped for.
Will I see it soon, again, or ever?

Saturdays with Marilyn  

We float on the pool all afternoon, weightless, reading,
our minds in other times and places,
a toe against a wall sending us off
in other directions in a world slowly turning,
the sun over our shoulders now, and again in our faces,
listening without attending to a pump that could be
the sound of the ocean, aware of time only as shade
moving across the pool, and the hungry dog barking.
We are worlds the ants find and we send them swimming.

We pass each other, gently bumping now and then,
a togetherness of sympathetic rest,
a pause in years of joint and several lives
like islands that are parts of a single country,
separate universes, contradictory in terms,
but united in a fate that could have ancient roots.
Nothing is certain, they say, but attraction beats science.
Momentum and a breeze, energies that seem pointless,
are saving mercies in the last weeks of August.

A short telephone message
came from the vet’s office:
“The ashes are ready.”
Two weeks before, “Wally” snapped
at my hand, frightened,
his hind legs paralyzed.
It was the end of a long illness.
I cradled him in a towel.
They were kind to us.
I told them he was a good dog;
that he was now in doggy heaven.
Their sympathy card is still on the refrigerator.

A wild boar colored mini-Daschund,
his ******* called him “Stormin’ Norman”
because he was the litter runt;
but we named him after
the wallaby he resembled,
and because he was a “soft” dog.

His sister, Wheedl, the alpha dog,
would try to steal his food.
She was the only one he ever growled at.
He never tilted his head, perplexed at humans,
like dogs who don’t understand us.
If we were leaving the house,  
he just looked away, resigned.
When a dropped biscuit flew under the refrigerator,
he knew where it would come out
if we hit it with a wooden spoon.
He would stand on that spot,
while his sister, a more typical dog,  
would stand where it went in.

Wheedl is now lost.
She can’t hear, and stays very close.

We have returned our gift to mother earth.

when the world is cold
and hills are high
there must be eyes
to see a sky

When I can’t see
you are my eyes

you see beauty
in empty spaces
you find treasures
in unlikely places

when mine are absent
you are my eyes

I always wanted freedom,
not being told what to do.
But I broke the law,
got caught and sent to jail.
My children were taken away.
And no one brings them to see me
while I serve time.
People I thought I knew
are now strangers.
My children have forgotten me,
but I haven’t forgotten them.
Catching up is the hardest thing
when you're in jail
and doors on the outside are still closed.
I want to push my daughter on a swing.
I want to hold my son’s hand
and walk down the street.
The law is a barbed wire
around my life,
a noose that uses the weight
of my past against me.

Standing beside this seagull
motionless in air and eyeing me,
I lean against the pilot’s cabin
and follow water lines, distant, silent and still
pouring down from mountain lakes.

From these narrow fiords, deep
as mountains, glacier-cut in eons,
I look for the Viking ship to round a bend,
loud and frightening;
or were they not long dead,
and their boats long decayed?
It was only ghosts.
But they were there.
Grieg could see them too.