Before Dark, and After Read online

  yet to come, they will persist, contained in a memory—

  roused from slumber, awakened, yet carried on in a dream

  of dreaming.

  ***

  Curvature

  A glacier

  peels from the eaves

  into watery windows.

  Dripping sun melts what’s left.

  If I look

  I can see a robin’s eggshell

  cracked by contrails.

  Stars everywhere

  reveal mostly the general homogeneity

  of the universe, yet individuals

  and constellations attest

  to the stubborn persistence

  of difference.

  The Congresswoman’s slope

  of recovery remains steep;

  Egyptian skulls remain also at risk.

  The revolution has come,

  but where will it go?

  Today is warm,

  relatively; whenever ice falls

  my skittish dogs jump.

  (The photo experiment

  interrupted by war to end war

  shows inconstant starlight

  bent towards an eclipsed sun—

  now imagine

  if the light couldn’t escape.)

  Last night

  I stood in the north doorway

  looking out;

  an encompassing darkness (outlining the arc

  of an event horizon)

  enclosed an unending Abyss

  and stars in the trees.

  A single star

  fell through the branches—so quickly

  I barely could breathe.

  ***

  Northern Night

  Last night the Aurora Borealis tinted the sky

  with cool firelight, so tonight

  I am hoping to see what I missed.

  The moon, rising, is but a fingernail clipping

  carrying an empty placenta elucidated by darkness.

  I will walk around, go home,

  perhaps even go out again up the hill before light

  to stand alone in the field

  where my brothers and I once powdered clay pigeons

  or missed, pausing just long enough after

  to hear the shot spray like hail in the woods.

  ***

  Once on a Blue Moon

  12/31/2009

  Full moonlight

  reveals thin lines

  of trees on blue snow.

  My cat sits

  on the couch

  at the window,

  a silhouette blacker

  than all outdoors.

  The coal fire at my back

  makes a blue flame

  licking the interstices

  of feeling,

  but I am neither desirous

  nor disheartened

  knowing I am an interval

  too, by turns warm

  or cold, light

  or shadow.

  ***

  Moment

  Deer meet

  in deep woods, content

  to mingle idly and ruminate

  while the world fills with snow.

  Brittle as rice paper,

  leaves quiver on an oak tree

  overhead. The deer

  scratch a fragile surface, revealing

  mast and lacelike leaves

  not yet quite decomposed.

 

  Purposeful, intent,

  mindful of someone’s shooting

  far ahead,

  they pause to look up, mouths agape,

  and taste the bitter air.

  ***

  Our Walk, First Thing This Morning

  We turn off the road

  and go down into the field

  where deer have imprinted the ground;

  I feel their presence to the right,

  hear the soft sibilance of hide and stiff hair

  before I see them: sleek bodies, dark and half formless,

  slicing through still frozen goldenrod.

  Beau sees them then too, and disappears into the hillside

  before I can call him back, but soon returns

  to lead us again across the high ridge towards home.

  I see at last a funneling grapevine

  grown into dead shadow on the shed roof behind the high barn

  and then the fox, standing sideways, looking startled,

  a hundred paces straight ahead.

  The dogs, making chase, conform to a line of three

  leaving, one after the other, in ascending order of speed.

  Leaving as well, last and most slowly, I follow.

  ***

  Parting

  for Tian

  At the first concert we smiled to each other

  and though I did not think of love,

  I thought of you after. Later, in the market,

  we met again, and again you asked me my age

  and told me your name, beginning

  my puzzlement and embarrassment.

  The night following a movie I wanted to kiss you

  you shyly giggled, so we parted

  shaking hands instead. When I arrived the next day

  on your threshold, you closed your door, asking I not linger

  to listen while you practiced your violin.

  Now it seems we have been parting ever since.

  After our last concert we stood in the spring snow;

  I watched your hair fill up with stars

  and desired you stay, later regretting

  I did not tell you before you decided to leave.

  In the days to come you will go far away from here.

  I will envision you among the cherry blossoms

  on the Potomac, or walking a street in New York City.

  You say you have not made up your mind

  but I know you have, so even though I search all of China

  I’ll likely not see you again.

  ***

  Aftermath

  The time will come

  to step through the snow

  going the way of the fields

  and woods.

  The dogs will plow

  furrows to walk in

  or walk behind me in mine.

  Pine branches

  touching the ground

  might spontaneously spring

  free, or be actuated

  by the movements of perched crows,

  all the while in stillness

  for miles around

  I’ll detect not a whiff

  of the wind prying tonight

  at the eaves.

  ***

  Snow Moon

  for Carl

  Printing herringbones, I traced

  our halting half-steps up through trees

  and stopped where they stopped in open snow

  to look afield and review the far wood

  cut by the clean curve of a meadow

  where, in a perfect world, either of us might build

  a home, raise crops, chickens, a family.

  Though I had come to see the hunger moon

  and to see in the blown snow

  some evidence of our passing, I found

  no sign of the moon, or of our selves.

  On the far side of the wood

  I put aside thoughts of life’s temporality

  and left my mark as best I could,

  etching the snow with a memory

  of the pure meadow line to my rear

  before turning for town, stopping once

  to watch the whole moon emerge from a field

  lined with row upon row

  of perfectly rendered, perfectly concentric

  corn stubble.

  ***

  The Leonid Meteor Shower

  for Robbie

  The sky is streaked

  as in a Japanese print, raining meteors

  over the pro
w of the barn.

  Breathless, I press my nose to the kitchen window,

  fogging cold glass.

  A moment ago, dizzy, with the top of my head

  open to the infinite vacuum above,

  all I could think of was getting inside.

  Now I wish I had persevered, for comfort

  seems every bit the barrier to perception as observing.

  Still, if Heisenberg were here to see these flitting flameouts,

  to revel in each chance commingling of potential and destiny,

  even he would witness with perfect clarity and wonder:

  What took eons to arrange finishes in a flash.

  ***

  Shy of Heaven

  We do not commonly talk

  of animals being,

  not as in humans being,

  or more than seldom consider

  the flicker of awareness behind the eyes of a dog,

  even a beloved pet,

  as anything other than contentment

  or appreciation of our being with them

  in an ever-fleeting present.

  Accepting it as a gift, their being

  allows us to view our surroundings

  as intimates;

  the world becomes what we see in their eyes.

  A leaf falls, a squirrel flips

  through a canopy of trees;

  we look up in rapt attention and wonder

  with sudden, considerable desire.

  So being, we become more than before,

  still animal, yet more—

  considering the chance a squirrel

  might fall, but wanting to see it also continue

  leaping branch to branch to branch.

  ***

  Tenuousness

  for Edith

  i

  Maybe

  Our being is too largely illusive;

  I edge to the gorge

  And even then the rocks seem unreal.

  Still I feel the pull of your hand

  In mine

  As you reach for the abyss

  To pluck asters from the shale wall.

  This morning the dogs and I walked in the woods.

  I thought of you only

  After hearing two raucous crows

  Reconnoitering above. One,

  Then another, still in my memory,

  Skim the bare treetops,

  Becoming again equal parts sky

  And fog.

  ii

  From the gorge’s edge

  The rocks below seem inviting and unreal. Still

  I shudder, remembering

  Your hand in mine.

  I took the dogs for a walk in a misting wood.

  Watching two crows skim the bare treetops,

  I thought of you.

  iii

  Belatedly it occurs to me

  The rocks seem unreal.

  I overlook the gorge

  As if to attempt faith

  Only to recoil again from the pull

  Of what argues against me.

  I think of you holding my hand,

  Reaching into the abyss

  To pick asters from the shale wall.

 

  iv

  This morning I took the dogs for a walk.

  I thought of you all the while.

  Above us the raucous krruck krruck

  Of two crows skimming bare treetops kept coming

  Then going across an unseen, fogged-over sky.

  Until their voices disappeared too.

 

  ***

  Riding Blind At Night

  I stay to the road by tilting my head back,

  following a course revealed as though reflected

  in the pale river of sky narrowly wending above this dug way.

  The analog signal transmitted from fork to fingers

  picked up and transferred by the front tire’s uncertain contact

  with earth, allows me to feel the unseen pressed surface

  hemmed in by ditches, steep banks, and overarching treetops

  constricting light from the stars to a trickle.

  The transition from night to pure dark makes me think

  this place is a very Valley-of-Death cut into the bulk of a hill

  where all manner of beast—bobcat and bear

  and who knows what else—lie lurking, waiting to pounce.

  And yet, apprehension turns to mild bemusement

  as halfway up the hill some insubstantial critter approaches from behind

  and attaches its presence to mine like a sidecar, pacing doggedly

  with a multiplicative badgering patter of tiny fast feet

  while I continue to churn the crank slowly

  round and round, pulling so hard on the handles it is a wonder

  the bicycle does not perform a back flip revolving about me

  on its own as I strain to climb the steep grade.

  Ever gradually, the summit gives up the advantage

  and I outrace my companion to where earth and tree shadows fall away, yielding sky

  and level high ground.

  At last, I stand on the pedals and coast, transecting

  cool hayfields, breathing thin air infused with the scent of cut grass.

  Rolling towards a still undefined distance, I imagine deer in the impervious darkness

  lifting their heads, curiously watching what must surely appear to them

  a mere apparition of some strange, gliding beast.

  ***

  Three Crows

  On stiff stick legs

  the first walks across the yard;

  the second flies to the shagbark and lights

  on a high hanging crooked branch;

  the third, perched in a sumac

  between lawn and back field,

  finally launches on a single strong wing-beat,

  landing with a sideways fanning flourish

  amid scattering jays, squirrels,

  broken nutshells.

  As they regroup,

  the squirrels and jays

  seem somehow less than the blackness of crows—

  blotting patches of green grass and snow,

  making silhouettes suggestive of nothing else

  but what exists, for a time, where it will.

  ***

  I Went for a Walk

  I went for a walk with the dogs

  along the path at the edge of the field

  looking out over the winding road

  with the wind at my back before turning,

  shouldering into the breeze to check on a nest-box,

  lifting the slanted front to inspect for fresh interest inside.

  I pull a length of old web from the oblong entrance hole

  before closing the front down again, walking backwards

  along a broken fence-line to appraise the far hills across the valley,

  turning about in time to see Beau running, whipping

  about like a limber whippet turning

  on the same reversing bend taken two seconds before by the fox

  he pursued; now as I, entranced by the fluid arc

  of their twined horizontal tumbling/thrashing through weeds,

  still pursue the moment we first saw him, before the fox turned away.

  And here I laugh, left wondering where that fox is going,

  taking both my dogs along for the exercise.

  I imagine them escaped to untamed fields and woods

  where in body and mind I not as certainly follow, stepping carefully

  to avoid trampling May apples

  going down a steep sloping bank to a muddy bottom

  where imprinted paw-prints climb inexorably on

  to the next hayfield, leading nowhere.

  Now here, I remember the sudden near orchard whiteness

  while still admiring the Indian blush of a far hillside

  and
turning again, a last time towards home,

  discover bitten rhubarb amid a patch of shiny grass in the back yard

  where the wind stroked it down.

  A spruce tree standing just inside the profuse and imperfectly kempt lawn

  sprouts small purple seed cones, which I move closer to see

  (as well note) with an innocent intention to catalogue all

  for sometime further on.

 

  ***

  Midnight on Moss Lake

  A scream pierced the quiet.

  The moon lay flat on the sky, flatter still

  on the calm water below.

  Two boys camping where prohibited

  built no fire, fearing discovery if not flames

  in the tinder-dry needles and grass.

  The scream came from a woman being murdered,

  or a bobcat prowling not too far away,

  each possibility a delicious affirmation of a reason to fear.

  Years later, I took a young woman to the same place

  to see the same moon reflecting just as flat on the water.

  I related the tale of the lake as we walked

  down the boardwalk, supported on a floating peat

  mattress of pitcher plants, marsh marigolds, sticky sundew

  and wild cranberries, both living and gone—a world decomposing

  below our feet, drowning in a mire of all; eventually,

  I whispered, only the bog would remain, enclosing entirely

  the water’s shrinking edge. Already elsewhere

  poplars grew in the sedge as though planted on solid ground.

  We stopped. The still water waited as ever,

  dark and depthless. No-one knew we were there—

  making believable the suggestion I could

  slit her belly, send her buoyant-less body sliding

  off the end of the boardwalk

  into a glacial pool legend claims has no bottom;

  she might not resurface for five thousand years.

  I would throw out the knife, hear it splash in the dark,

  and that would be the end of her.