Cover

Dedication

For Carl

AFTER LONG SILENCE

Politeness fades,

a small anchovy gleam
leaving the upturned pot in the dish rack
after the moon has wandered out of the window.

One of the late freedoms, there in the dark.
The leftover soup put away as well.

Distinctions matter. Whether a goat’s
quiet face should be called noble
or indifferent. The difference between a right rigor and pride.

The untranslatable thought must be the most precise.

Yet words are not the end of thought, they are where it begins.

PYRACANTHA AND PLUM

Last autumn’s chastened berries still on one tree,

spring blossoms tender, hopeful, on another.

The view from this window

much as it was ten years ago, fifteen.

Yet it seems this morning

a self-portrait both clearer and darker,

as if while I slept some Rembrandt or Brueghel

had walked through the garden, looking hard.

FLOWERING VETCH

Each of the tragedies can be read

as the tale of a single ripening self,

every character part of one soul.

The comedies can be included in this as well.

Often the flaw is a flaw of self-knowledge;

sometimes greed. For this reason

the comic glint of a school of herring leads to no plot line,

we cannot imagine a tragedy of donkeys or bees.

Before the ordinary realities, ordinary failures:

hunger, coldness, anger, longing, heat.

Yet one day, a thought as small as a vetch flower opens.

After, no longer minding the minor and almost wordless role,

playing the messenger given the letter

everyone knows will arrive too late or ruined by water.

To have stopped by the fig and eaten was not an error, then,

but the reason for going.

THEOLOGY

If the flies did not hurry themselves to the window

they’d still die somewhere.

Other creatures choose the other dimension:

to slip

into a thicket, swim into the shaded, undercut

part of the stream.

My dog would make her tennis ball

disappear into just such a hollow,

pushing it under the water with both paws.

Then dig for it furiously, wildly, until it popped up again.

A game or a theology, I couldn’t tell.

The flies might well prefer the dawn-ribboned mouth of a trout,

its crisp and speed,

if they could get there,

though they are not in truth that kind of fly

and preference is not given often in these matters.

A border collie’s preference is to do anything entirely,

with the whole attention. This Simone Weil called prayer.

And almost always, her prayers were successful—

the tennis ball

could be summoned again to the surface.

When a friend’s new pound dog, diagnosed distempered,

doctored for weeks, crawled under the porch to die, my friend crawled after,

pulled her out, said, “No!”,

as if to live were just a simple matter of training.

The coy-dog, startled, obeyed.

Now trots out to greet my car when I come to visit.

Only a firefly’s evening blinking outside the window,