—“Long period” comets have eccentric orbits that can exceed 100,000 years.

                       

We rise early and, while it’s still cool, breakfast
on the patio then walk with other hotel guests
carrying flipper- and mask-filled mesh bags
to a concrete pier where throaty outboards
meet us.  Up and down the coast, other piers,
other motors and other groups of divers.
Wakes soon mullion the morning sea.
To make the most of their trips, visitors
especially newcomers like the two of
us, must hire a master intimate with
the marine terroir. Those who taught
us in a stateside swimming pool have
tried the local talent and recommend
Pasqual.  Five feet tall and roundish,
with a face predating Cortez, he greets
each of eight clients as we board
a 30-footer that cost his youth to earn.
Licensed and responsible for our
lives he gauges us in glances, weighing
attitudes and equilibrium, choosing
whom to keep a practiced eye
on down below.  Fingers absent
from both hands point to mainland
factory runoff encountered in the
womb but the waters he leads
us to are clear.  Passing two abreast
behind him in a dappled 3D glide
we find nurse sharks lounging
in a swaying grove of kelp and
parrot-jawed clownfish swooping
to nip greens.  Barracuda measure
us, stepping off, stepping up.  We
stir a watchful swirl of sequins
in a cave.  After three immense
immersions, a break for dinner,
and a nap, we reassemble for our
first night dive.  Who’d have guessed
how little getting used to falling
off a slow cliff of inner darkness takes?
Our eyes walk on pickup sticks of
light.  Eels ripple from recesses
while nautiluses climb the water
column.  Clicking crabs sumo
when kabuki won’t resolve their
differences. The cuttlefish hovering
beside us displays a pattern on itself
akin to calligraphy as it holds our
gaze across a gulf of time broad
enough for corals to microscopically
iterate atolls in as they blossom
and die.  We linger, watching polyps
siphon particles from the flow,
then surface, ecstatic, in amniotic
swells beside the boat.  When silence
overlaps our gasps, Pasqual points
up. In the bright plankton of the
Milky Way it resembles the first
invertebrates, sponges and jellyfish
that we’ve risen from.  It has over-
flown those phyla thousands of times.
Knowing how fast it’s going, as the Mid-
western minister among us happens to,
makes its apparent stillness that much
more attractive.  When it last appeared
people were starting to adorn themselves
with shells. When it comes again, we’ll be gone.

Correspondence with Fog & Consolation

Not everything is what it seems. The fog’s a reminder
that we’re each trapped in our own prison we call the self,

& the best we can hope for is that in the next cell over
there’s someone we can talk with, or, if we’re lucky,

sing with, harmonizing after lights out for hours.
Someone who knows all the same songs. Maybe

music isn’t the right metaphor. Maybe
we should hope that whoever is doing time

in the next cell over has arms just long enough
to reach past the thick wall between the cells

so that, if we strain, our fingertips can just graze,
that brief touch enough to ignite

whatever passion still smolders in the almost cold
fireplaces we used to call our hearts.

I’m not smart enough to know the right image
or the right words to make it real. But I want to be

able to sing songs with you long into whatever night
we could share, to have arms long enough to be able to

touch your fingertips, & I want that touch
to make a music we could hold each other

& dance to till the music ends. The fog
this morning has turned this world into a sadder version

of Hades. Sadder because at least Hades had
the river Lethe, the river of forgetfulness.

If a soul entered the underworld by swimming that river,
all the sorrows of their life in the world above

were forgotten, washed away. But then the pleasures
& joys were lost, too. Still, there are times

when I wish I could go for a dip in the Lethe
so I could just forget everything. But

that would mean forgetting you. As tempting
as it might be to want to forget everything,

were I standing on the damp shore of the Lethe
& thought of you I would have to

turn away & pay my coins to Charon to ferry me
over the river Styx into the afterlife. Yes,

that would mean I’d have to carry with me what Rilke wrote
in the Duino Elegies is all we can take

with us—pain. But at least I’d still have
the memory of something that was good

in the world. Despite the pain, to have
the memory of you to keep me company

makes the fog seem less sad. For days, it’s been
nothing but rain, as if even the sky has

been missing you. The same sky that lingers
over you, &, I have no doubt, is in

a far better mood there, getting to listen to
your voice, your laughter, & to watch you dance

under it, consoled by your beauty & grace.
Consolation mostly escapes me here,

but for the brief conversations when you call,
your voice an elixir, soothing. Funny, how

the sound of a voice, though from far off,
can make the rain into something other than a curse.

Now that the rain has finally ended
& the clouds have moved on, may you

be dancing under the same clear sky
that has arrived here. And laughing.

To Support the Theory

The light in this moment wants to do nothing
more than illuminate the café
where the singer’s raspy reed of a voice

defies the static from a battered jukebox
accompanied by music worried out
of shopworn instruments by studio musicians

paid by the hour. Nothing more than to clarify
how the lyrics are a gauze
layered over the body the singer’s lover has bruised

so often not even the crack she smoked
just before recording her brittle voice
singing, or as close as she could come to

singing, over the tracks already laid-down
could let her forget how love can be
spent in a bright-lit emergency waiting room

where the only other people are missing
fingers or entire limbs & no one
makes a sound & still a sobbing seems to come

from a time so far in the past it could almost be
the future. This light wants nothing more
than to support the theory not everything is

about waiting. Some hear the singer’s voice
as a kind of sobbing that’s broken
enough to recognize it as beautiful, the lyrics

written down, perhaps, by Yeats after
a night Maud Gonne let him kiss her
nipples taut before she whispered, so calm

it hurt him, Enough, & pushed him off her
& covered up, her fingers signing,
as they slipped buttons through holes,

Never again in the dull flickers of candles
that, burning, made a sound like what scratches
will make as the needle scrapes over them

on vinyl in years to come. The sound,
almost, of the singer’s hoarse voice stitched in
& out of the musicians’ ardent performances.

The sound, it’s tempting to say, a lover might make
being tender. Breathing, say, a name over
a clitoris too sensitive still to touch. A sound

echoed by the hushed inhalation as the woman
shivers from the passage of formed air
out her lover’s mouth. Say the scratchy music

the woman hears becoming aware again of
the world is the song sung in the bruised voice
of another woman that sounds, to this

woman whose lover is kissing his way
up her stomach to her erect nipples,
like a kind of sobbing, like the crying out

of an old man who hangs out in the light
of an emergency waiting room
looking for the lover he’s lost, listening

for the voice of a ghost whispering his name
in his ear. Say the light in this waiting room
wants nothing more than to suggest nothing

is lost. Not the way the musicians loved
what their instruments let them
discover in this world. Not the sound

of an almost broken woman singing
lyrics that are all she remembers
of how little pleasure it takes to keep us

longing to breathe in all the world we can.

Canine Riffs in the Neighborhood

Is it possible her absence has become

the reason the dog two doors down
has taken to barking what could be mistaken

for a passage from “Stairway to Heaven”
in the mornings & again in the evenings,

as if to repeat a bit of music

might be enough to offer as evidence
that there are no accidents, that nothing is

as haphazard as love is said to be?

The dog only knows the longing to sing
comes on, & it does, & for blocks

lovers forget their mistakes & go looking
for one another to do a little dance

& remind each other just why they are

together. The dog’s guttural rendition of
the Led Zeppelin classic doesn’t get me

dancing. Her absence means I have no one
to put my arms around & move to

any music with. The damn mutt could be
barking out Chopin & it wouldn’t matter.

Not even Mozart or Van Morrison
would mean a thing. All the canine music in

the world can’t give me a body to hold,
to move together with to any rhythm

with any amount of grace. Out there

other dogs on other streets are taking up
whatever song they think they are singing,

& the dancing of couples that accompanies
this almost dissonant music

has me cursing the absence that’s brought all this on,
remembering the nights we would

dance through this house to no music but our own.

 

ALTARPIECE TEA

What is he looking at, the ambulance driver
sitting at a table inside a yellow square
of light across the parking lot? Is he
taking reports of those who clutch
their hearts and wonder what, exactly,
a hitch, a stab portends, if it screams,
requires noise and speed and a team,
or is he looking at the bad news of the day,
his daughter’s untoward selfie, a joke
from the ex who’s now more friend
than foe? When he pulls aside
the curtain, oddly lacey in a room
otherwise industrial orange, I wonder
if he’s watching me watch him as I sip
the marvel of this tea called Altarpiece,
a heap of stems and flowers poured
from a paper sack and brought alive
by steep. How many souls
has this driver leaned in to bless
with his ear to the last rush
of summer joys as they flare
and flee; how many squirming
gifts has he lifted, red and squalling,
into the dangerous air? In a village
like this where dark comes at three,
we all see the others at their meals
and ennuis yet never the pain
about to writhe from a mangle
of machinery, or a simple struggle
to breathe. There’s an apothecary
on every corner, and a tea for every ill,
blossoms, stems and roots they
gather all the summer, dry, and steep
against the chill. I try to learn
the local names for lichen,
mint, and heather, absorb the vaunted
gifts of wormwood, oak and linden,
marvel at there being a Second
Youth, a taste of Yellow Kittens,
but I’m sure I’d rather know
what’s in the one called Mother,
the one called Peace.

 

 

EGG

All day the lacquer of an egg
has insisted in my mouth,
the animal of it refusing
to liquefy completely.

The egg was a blue one
my neighbor took from beneath
his blue hen in the blue air
of early dawn, and we both know

its bright orange yolk
is signature of all the busy wings
born to feed and teem, mosquito,
fly and grub, the dreaded deer ticks

and plague of dotted beetles
my child longed to catch until
he understood they weren’t
entirely benign, but tiny pods

of stink that massed and juiced
and made him sneeze. The egg
was blue clear through
the inside of its shell, unlike

the browns with cream insides,
a blue the hen extrudes early
in the egg’s swell, a blue
that fades with her age,

and becomes a blue so docile
we could miss it, like quiet.
My neighbor balanced the hen
lightly on his arm as I parted,

and I tasted that all day too.

 

 

BRUSH PYRE

Funny how much recluse sounds
like reckless, and yet is opposite of.
Is what reckless becomes. Can’t
and won’t and retreat. Has no one
else discovered the sound of one’s
voice is ever more faint in the copse?

Recuse, retire, redouble. We say
“earth” when we mean the planet
like a frigate without its spirits,
and “the world” when we mean the wills
of everyone else. It’s those millions
of convictions pressing act, react

or more often, slack boredom, all
peripheral but sure: get up, talk,
tell us what we long to. Tell us
yours, but as we think it ought,
the death story. You can turn it off,
but you don’t. You can turn away,

won’t. Look at all those wishes
like plankton glowing in a tide
or fields where once all fireflies
said dusk, dusk, dusk. If that’s what
we are, then it’s good and right
to fall on one knee to woods,

do nothing but scan scrub
like a face of, marvel of grasses
and thorn in hues that will not take
name, especially in snow,
the delicacy of plum bent
and burned green, the way

a weed can stand up all winter
and fold at first thaw. From Latin
for to shut or close, and not
for the first time, to re-close,
to close again, and maybe to stay
or to keep closing anew

in reaction or rhythm, in stages,
the way my father begins to think,
one year on, that he wants to go again
everywhere they went together,
because the coals must be fed wind
when the grief is still green.

 

Reason and One of Its Limitations

You may perceive the invisible man
By perceiving the air that he displaces.

In the dark of night, he is that part
Of the night that is not night, that takes

The place of night even as the night
Defines him.  He is an opening,

A doorway that he may walk through, out
Of the dark into the dark, toward

A street where, at the corner, he becomes
What is not light within the light.

Japanese Aesthetics, I’ve Heard, Allow for the Beautiful Flaw

Most of my life, I have fixed, or tried
To fix, broken things—bicycles,

A toaster, a mantle clock, several
Houses—, but for years I didn’t know

Just how broken I am, nor how
Impossible to fix.  It’s funny, all

That urge to fix everything else because
I was taught what cannot be fixed

Is trash, no matter how
Beautiful anyone may find the breakage.

The Apperception of Absence and of “Absence”

I: Rorschach

A little pond of ink and a fold
Make a symmetry of chance,

And so we find a young wife
Poisoning her husband, a father beating

A daughter, a masked man crawling
Through your window.  Try to see

Your better life in this seep of ink,
A spread of thunderclouds, a stain

That doubles, that smears both sides
Of the mirror, that leaps across the divide.

II: The Position of Curator of The Museum of Absence Remains Unfilled

III: Despite What We Don’t See, No Void Is Actually Empty

Some frames are so beautiful, they need
No painting.  Some structures are glorious
In their ruin.  Some maps show best
Where we have never gone nor ever will.
Some words mean more in their absence.