The black of the Amish buggies makes the snow seem whiter,

I won't even have to look up.

I will wince & agree with you both, & past the farms

Abandoned to moonlight, past one late fire burning beside

A field, the flame rising up against the night

To take its one solitary breath, even I

Will be a believer.

DECRESCENDO

If there is only one world, it is this one.

In my neighborhood, the ruby-helmeted woodpecker's line

Is all spondees, & totally formal as it tattoos

Its instinct & solitude into a high sycamore which keeps

Revising autumn until I will look out, &

Something final will be there: a branch in winter—not

Even a self-portrait. Just a thing.

Still, it is strange to live alone, to feel something

Rise up, out of the body, against all that is,

By law, falling & turning into the pointless beauty

Of calendars. Think of the one in the office closed

For forty-three summers in a novel by Faulkner, think

Of unlocking it, of ducking your head slightly

And going in. It is all pungent, & lost. Or

It is all like the doomed singers, Cooke & Redding,

Who raised their voices against the horns'

Implacable decrescendos, & knew exactly what they

Were doing, & what they were doing was dangerous.

The man on sax & the other on piano never had to argue

Their point, for their point was time itself; & all

That one wished to say, even to close friends,

One said beside that window: The trees turn; a woman

Passing on the street below turns up her collar against

The cold; &, if the music ends, the needle on the phonograph

Scrapes like someone raking leaves, briefly, across

A sidewalk, & no one alone is, particularly, special.

That is what musicians are for, to remind us of this, unless

Those singers die, one shot in a motel room

By a woman who made a mistake; & one dead

In a plane crash, an accident.

Which left a man on sax & another on piano

With no one to back up, &, hearing the news,

One sat with his horn in a basement in Palo Alto,

Letting its violence go all the way up, &

Annoying the neighbors until the police came,

And arrested him—who had, in fact, tears

In his eyes. And the other, a white studio

Musician from L.A., who went home & tried

To cleave the keyboard with his hands until

They bled, & his friends came, & called his wife,

And someone went out for bandages & more bourbon—

Hoping to fix up, a little, this world.

Puyé

A LETTER

“I wanted to be able To bear this. I have tried to.”

—Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book X

It's better to have a light jacket on days like this,

Than a good memory. I would like not to remember

For a while. I would like to stroll beside

The river the way the river strolls, with its

Quick insouciance, its impatience when the shoreline

Of thick trees, factories, & lit houses

Narrows suddenly, before a low spillway