and not scattered on the shifting gray Pacific.

VETERANS’ CEMETERY

The ceremonies of the day have ceased,

Abandoned to the ragged crow’s parade.

The flags unravel in the caterpillar’s feast.

The wreaths collapse onto the stones they shade.

How quietly doves gather by the gate

Like souls who have no heaven and no hell.

The patient grass reclaims its lost estate

Where one stone angel stands as sentinel.

The voices whispering in the burning leaves,

Faint and inhuman, what can they desire

When every season feeds upon the past,

And summer’s green ignites the autumn’s fire?

The afternoon’s a single thread of light

Sewn through the tatters of a leafless willow,

As one by one the branches fade from sight,

And time curls up like paper turning yellow.

THE SONG

How shall I hold my soul that it

does not touch yours? How shall I lift

it over you to other things?

If it would only sink below

into the dark like some lost thing

or slumber in some quiet place

which did not echo your soft heart’s beat.

But all that ever touched us—you and me—

touched us together

like a bow

that from two strings could draw one voice.

On what instrument were we strung?

And to what player did we sing

our interrupted song?

(After the German of Rainer Maria Rilke)

THE GODS OF WINTER

Storm on storm, snow on drifting snowfall,

shifting its shape, flurrying in moonlight,

bright and ubiquitous,

profligate March squanders its wealth.

The world is annihilated and remade

with only us as witnesses.

Briefest of joys, our life together,

this brittle flower twisting toward the light

even as it dies, no more permanent

for being perfect. Time will melt away

triumphant winter, and even your touch

prove the unpossessable jewel of ice.

And vanish like this unseasonable storm

drifting there beyond the windows where even

the cluttered rooftops now lie soft and luminous

like a storybook view of paradise.

Why not believe these suave messengers

of starlight? Morning will make

their brightness blinding, and the noon insist

that only legend saves the beautiful. But if

the light confides how one still winter must

arrive without us, then our eternity

is only this white storm, the whisper

of your breath, the deities of this quiet night.

PLANTING A SEQUOIA

All afternoon my brothers and I have worked in the orchard,

Digging this hole, laying you into it, carefully packing the soil.

Rain blackened the horizon, but cold winds kept it over the Pacific,

And the sky above us stayed the dull gray

Of an old year coming to an end.

In Sicily a father plants a tree to celebrate his first son’s birth—

An olive or a fig tree—a sign that the earth has one more life to bear.

I would have done the same, proudly laying new stock into my father’s orchard,

A green sapling rising among the twisted apple boughs,