TO GRAVEL: AN ASSAY

In you, as in a life, the part cannot stand for the whole.

One chip of you bites the hand like a word

scissored out of its sentence, without power to help or to harm.

Aggregation is not mathematics—a crowd

not the sum of its persons,

a building not the calculus of its brick;

a teaspoon of you is not yet you, though a single salt flake is salt.

Your philosophy is surely Linnaean, a simple sorting.

Your unit of measure and meditation is weight.

Yet being part air, you can be poured:

for a moment an arc,

a lip, sheers from the truck-bed, glittering like water.

But neither translucent

nor tender toward what you touch, you are not like water.

You are like breath—

a woman sits by the hospital night-bed hearing the difference

between one and many:

a single one of either of you is everything,

a single one of either of you is nothing at all.

EACH MORNING MY NEIGHBOR WALKS OUT

In the morning

my neighbor walks onto his deck and looks out,

some days in a yellow jacket,

some days in a raincoat, some days in a shirt

The house is far enough off

I do not know his name, cannot quite see his face.

I would not know him in line at the grocery.

He looks for a moment in my direction, across the small gorge,

then turns and reenters his door.

Between us leaves shift their colors, fall, reappear.

Between us the flash of a bluejay, sometimes a hawk.

Each time happiness greatens, sorrows too must increase,

but I cannot let go the longing for what passes.

BETWEEN THE MATERIAL WORLD AND THE WORLD OF FEELING

Between the material world and the world of feeling there must be a border—on one side, the person grieves and the cells of the body grieve also; the molecules also; the atoms. Of this there are many proofs. On the other, the iron will of the earth goes on. The torture-broken femur continues to heal even in the last hour, perhaps beyond; the wool coat left behind does not mourn the loss of its master. And yet Cavafy wrote, “In me now everything is turned into feeling—furniture, streets.” And Saba found in a bleating goat his own and all beings’ sorrow, and this morning the voice of that long-dead goat—which is only, after all, a few black-inked words—cries and cries in my ears. Rilke, too, believed the object longs to awaken in us. But I long for the calm acceptance of a bentwood chair and envy the blue-green curve of a vase’s shoulder, which holds whatever is placed within it—the living flower or the dead—with an equally tender balance, and knows no difference between them.

RED SCARF

The red scarf