gives me the food she hasn’t eaten all day, the words

she hasn’t spoken. So afterwards, it is almost easy.

To walk outside where the young monks are chewing

gum in the sun, listen to them scatter down stairways

like sparrows, point to the opening of space through

which I mean to escape. I want it to be graceful,

as she was, feather touches on your jacket and a jewel

in your hands. But when the light hits us from behind

the granite cliffs, all I can muster is to lie with you

on the monastery floor, guide your fingers to the door-

ways of my weary heart, so you can feel it too —

the ocean that travels with me; how it gathers and breaks,

gathers and breaks; like love, how it stills, then parts.

Turning Off the Lights

These walls are from yesterday.

Today, rain falls like history,

and trees speak of distant woes.

My father stands on a cliff

contemplating childhood.

By afternoon, the world has changed,

become smaller,

desolate.

All this is nothing —

these red leaves on autumn walks,

these planets hurtling from long ago.

Later, we may dream of fires

and singing.

The house will open her doors

for the dark, salty territory of night

to enter on wet footstep,

falcon wing.

My father comes in to turn off the lights.

Together, he says,

we must call in the lost,

breathe shape into all that is vanishing.

Falling, 1968

My mother arrives in India

breathless, leaning against

the airport railing, looking sad,

bereft, as though she’s never put

her head against the wind before.

It is Guy Fawkes Day, 1968.

The start of National Small Pox

Eradication Week. It has been raining;

cruel, historic, monsoon rain,

uprooting posts along the border,

where Pakistan, only 21, like her,

is drowning in silver cattle skulls,

locust dreams. My father,

standing on a cusp of sudden light,

waits like sin to watch her fall.

The rest of the world is falling, too:

students, Bedouins, lorry drivers,

in West Berlin, Amman, Ootacamund.

Throwing their Marxist lives into ideas

like liberation, like love.

My mother, moving across the air

of all this, must have known how falling

in love is something like dying after all.

Something the seas and sky evade

to survive the centuries.

Perhaps this is why she agrees to tumble

to the blackened chambers of the earth

like a virgin queen ant on her nuptial flight,

burying the snow-lit nights of her youth

in galleries of dust, blades of wing.

So later, after birthing kingdoms

from the gauze of her Celtic belly,

she can say she was the illumination

once — the slow possibility

of love in my father’s life.

Seasons

By October the reach of sky is complete.

Everything longs for escape —

the snow geese weaving their way south,

the pigs in the yard,

the leaves.

We are walking that line between the trees,

shameful in their half-foliage,

replete with desire.

Somewhere across the valley