Hood

The hood obscures his face. He stands
with his back to me holding
what looks like a hockey stick.
He is always there but never near.

When he does turn I know
some part of me will welcome him.
Proliferating cells will leap forward
or others thin and break.

Perhaps, even now, he watches
the bullet fall off an assembly line,
or counts the clicks
as I book a seat on that doomed flight.

He has smothered children in their snowbank tunnels,
extinguished mothers on their beds of labour,
escorted heroes of the revolution
to the guillotine or gulag,
blessed my parents
with heart attacks.

I listen to my steady thump,
diet and exercise and take my meds.

I am full of hope.
But when he turns, I know
it will be my heart
that leaps.

Mark the Date

I am dying, Egypt, dying
Mark Antony said that afternoon
three years ago, when we walked
from the British Museum to the Globe
and paused at St. Paul’s for evensong
on the walk back.

Now I am in Act Five.
Week by week I ebb.

I can’t walk across the park,
can’t walk a block,
can’t go outside.
A flight of stairs looms
unclimbable
between me and bed.

It is fast, but slower than I expected.
My father and his father
dropped at work.
My mother and her mother announced
I don’t feel very well. I think
I’ll just lie down. And never
rose again.

In any century but this
I would put my affairs in order,
plan my funeral,
summon family, give them
the last bits of wisdom from my
oxygen-starved brain.

But now I contemplate these miracles:
how Beethoven arranged black dots
on paper to make emotion,
how that emotion reliably
lowers my blood pressure.

How Miss Jane Austen’s heroines –
Elizabeth, Emma, Elinor – all surmount
their problems of the heart.

How soon masked men will
set my breasts aside, to break my sternum
and touch my heart. They will cut it,
sew it – after taking a deep breath in
like my mother when she cut into
expensive taffeta to make a wedding dress.

Poem for the Bones

My bones conspire against me.
In whispered clicks,
tarsus to talus to cuneiform,
they plot which will slide,
which will shatter.

They weren’t always like this.
I slid into the world
cartilaginous as a shark.
Skull bones slid over one another,
compressed me into air.

Now I am as tall as they are long,
used to hearing Hey Sir! from behind.
And now patella bitches at the quadriceps femora,
socket pouts at ball,
and in spite of all that calcium

I am an inch shorter than I used to be.

I always thought of my bones as
the only part of me that might
have an afterlife.

I see them hung on a frame
in the anatomy classroom,
skull modestly inclined, smiling.

Misled by length of tibia and femur
the students will call me
Mister Bones.

Renee’s Song

It’s -8 degrees below
As I watch Renee’ trudge
Out in deep snow, to her
Birdfeeders she’ll go, with her
Big bucketful of birdseed
And fresh packets of suet,
The Chickadees see her coming,
Perched high up in the tree,
And commence to sing her
A song, perhaps in honor
Of her pouring this huge
Black mound of birdseed
Into her birdfeeders, that
Soon is overflowing all
Over the ground.

We want to thank you dear Renee’
For our blessed seeds, you bring today.

The Chickadee song they
Sing, seems to me to say,
But forgive my very rough
Translation to English,
From the original Chickadee,
As they’ll sing Renee’s song
Long after she’s gone,
And swoop down to
Partake of their great
Bucketful of plenty.

Mass in B Minor        

for Chad Winterfeldt

It’s a high
Church scaffold
No one ever built
And no one
Can ever climb
Or touch,
It’s Sound
Beyond
Sound,
Yet Music,
True Enough,
When heard
As perhaps
This small bird
Who sings
Just to bring
The sun up.

Jazz Bass

In early morning
Way before dawn
Even before the last
Specks of moon
And stars are gone,
Before the first breeze
Of the day begins to stir,
Before the first peep of
The early bird is even
Heard, a deep bass note
Is suddenly struck,
Like from some Jazz
Bass buried deep down in
The universe, that’s then
So softly plucked, and
Out of this one single
Strum, grows a constant
And steady hum,
Rising just above these
Trees, ever so slightly,
Until we can just see
The first few rays
Of the morning sun.

                                   March 25, 7 a.m.
                                   Madison

Dear Ones–our wild backyard
is slowly showing up, snow cover
shrunk to patch, flattened thatch,
dried stalks–and chipmunks race
after each other, the rabbit
snuffles cracked corn and seed,
all of us impatient for new green–
in the bare tree tops the cardinals
find the rising sun, sing and sing,
while the robins, returned from
winter hunting grounds, hop
and scratch, hop and scratch
in the icy dirt. We put snow peas
into our garden plot just last week,
chiseling them into the frosty ground,
covering them with leaves. Five
turkeys, glossy in spring plumage,
walked the rows, looking for
something to eat.

 

 

 

 

Apples in Winter                 

I’m chopping two bags of Paula Reds, heaping
the pot with chunks that slowly crumple
to caramelized sauce, feeding the steaming,
cinnamoned lot to the food-mill, screening out
skin and pips to fill our Mason jars, lifted
from boiling water, with the sweet brown pulp
of apples, reducing two pecks to eight pints
pureed for grown-up taste and winter days–
apple butter, my mother called it, making us
sandwiches to pack for winter lunch.

 

 

 

                                     Early March,
                                     Madison

Dear Ones— a foot of snow
sops up the all-day rain
that should mean spring–
sops, and freezes, crusts
and puddles, slick as the lake
iced over, then pebbles
and calves, crunches, resists–
we’re captive still to our wish
for a safe place to place
a foot. The ice fishermen
have taken down their huts
and sit on their buckets
in shirt-sleeves, talking catches
in the bay, and the sandhills
and red-wings linger south
of our polar vortex, waiting
for places to nest.

 

 

 

The Present Gives Up Some Past 

She can’t shake it: This hour picked out like a dress
that fits her and she looks nice in it or even very
nice as her husband might say. She’s troweling
out a hole, digging into comfort soil for roots–
the lilies she found growing in a ditch.
She drove back with a spade for this bunch.

The yard’s mapped-out directions tuck traffic
noise away–the vehicular and emotional.
The lilies’ yellow, a choice color, is a real flourish,
as is her cat’s sudden appearance from somewhere–
the locust or scaly apple tree, the purple maple,
the three elms, green-bearded lords at the border
to the neighbor’s apple orchard. The cat’s fur,
the leaves, warm, lit by sun light’s blur.

Sounds rolling out the patio door: grocery sacks
rustling in the kitchen. Her husband. Imagine!
She had a husband then, and he’s returned.
Anybody home? His former German accent barely
detectable. Just wondering where everybody is.
The cat’s already racing up the deck steps. The woman
pats the soil down around the lilies and waters them.
Satisfied, she slaps loose soil from her hands and
joins her two everybody-home-agains in the kitchen.

 

 

Five x Five Equals Two-Five                                                      

When we’re lonely we may feel peculiarly
close to odd details, old details going
way back to the Goths who lost fingers
left and right whetting their axes
or butchering wild boars that bit
off the bird-finger, doomed to spend
the rest of its days apart from the hand.
Which is always at its most handsome
with all digits accounted for. Was it too
much to expect to keep two fives, even
in hardscrabble times?
                                        Guessing
now–the Goth word for “five” was finf,
halfway between fünf and five as in toes,
or where Galileo deduced a system’s number
of moons and comets. In addition he had three
children. His bastard son married into money,
the two daughters died young in a convent.
Their mother, the housekeeper, married.
From five down to two: Galileo the odd
man out with his telescope. Under a welter
of suns maybe he was the homeless one.

 

 

The Traveler

For her, a dinner–
lobster on a platter.
Out there, the harbor,
little boats skirt the bar.

She of the daily planner,
the yellow highlighter,
the eye upon the hour,
relaxes in her chair.

She the runner, earlier
the jogger along the shore,
its gray sand softer
than pavers, like wet powder

underfoot. She the outsider
taking on the air
of a beachfront insider,
finding in the sea desire.

Oh yes, the darker, fuller
heart beats faster, her
heart like the weather,
her lips warmed by butter.

 

 

 

 

 

 

LONG VIEW

Back when I wondered what
I had to do to make it, I knew
I would know it when I saw it,
The way I would know a lion

Flicking her tail in the grass had
Fixed her desire on me.  Back then
Each day opened itself, brilliant
And blank as empty glass.  This

I knew of beauty: its hunger,
Its delicate provocations.  And yes,
I believed the day waited to be filled,
And me to fill it.  Only how

Would I ever open myself so far,
How could I pour without spilling?

 

 

THE KINGDOM ASSERTS ITSELF

First, squirrels, calling
Annoyance at my progress
To fetch the paper, my news
All their concern, none of it.

Then, the hummingbirds
Rocketing straight up
And topping the trees,
Scouting for feeders I am late

Hanging on the balcony,
Buzzing my ears.  Where
Have I been, the orioles
Also insist, or rather

Where is their grape jelly
And could I go away now?
Every day passes through
Demand and response, raccoon

Growling over the bins, food
Herself for the rarely spotted
Bobcat easing his shy
Body up the walk, curving

Himself to see me.  Even
After dark I hear the eerie Who
Are you, wings with and without
Feathers filling the air

With audible silence.  Some
Questions have no answers
I can give.  Others
None I will take.

 

 

WHALE FALL

Because they live in the dark
Mostly they live in

Their ears, listening, singing
Back. We drop microphones

And eavesdrop below
The surface, letting them make us

Fishers of sound.  They surface
When they want and bob

Pointing their eyes at us in our
Strange vessels and bright

Flotation vests.  Why don’t we
Come on in?  They flip and dive

And return, those great
Temptresses, and wink, and finally

When they’ve exhausted
Our capacity to amuse them

Roll their vastness into
Greater vastness.   Because

They sometimes throw
Themselves onto our shores,

Enormous, evacuated,  where
They never meant to be, and like

Any body start to stink, we think
We know their fates.  But when

They come to their ends in deep
Waters, like us, alone, they sink

Back to where they came from
Out of sight and deep, where

We all came from, whether
Or not we end there.