You come to me but I
wander around.
I touch everything but you
till you
remove the blind
and see for me
you.
Tag Archives: poetry
On falling asleep to Williams’ Lark Ascending
There’s a measure of peace in all things,
a first warm sky of the season
in every bleating cold rainy dark
and so, though I see
neither through nor branch
in the blue from my couch,
my body’s settled to become
a meadow for the birds
Wally holds his tongue at the table
Your freedom is just a
chomping down on life,
a crunching of the world and self to bits,
a decorous atomization
Of weeds and wheat and smoke and fire
The Gronk has a punctured lung
maybe
the paper says
and you can still see the hit
the one-two
and still feel how
you were glad for it
after what he did to us
two years ago
catching that pass.
What Christ thinks of football I don’t want to know,
but I can see his eye
and hear his breath,
and I’d best be off
before I think some more.
I join my son at his video game –
At the rat-a-tat. I don’t like it.
The kills, I don’t like it.
Care packages,
tumbling, hulking soldiers
dropping – I don’t like it. No,
I don’t like it.
But I like him.
Last day
She held him, not trusting him to find the chair.
“We’re family,” she said. “Like family.
You don’t remember?”
He shook his head.
“You’ve come to our house for thirty years.”
He shrugged sorry.
“I have to go with him.”
He knew him, but not his name.
And later, after the coffee, he went.
For when he was young he could go where he liked.
But now was time for where he’d rather not go.
R.I.P. Fr. Piet van der Pol S.S.S. (D. 19 February 2017).
When you have children
When you have children your heart
leaves the safety of the rib cage.
The bones open up and the thing is out there
exposed
to torrents of bruises and dyes.
Grief and drugs
Grief and drugs
sit at the table.
I’ve never had a lover
as pretty as you.
Tears clear dust from the eyes
Might I, if no one minds, crawl from the
rubble of this world
to speak of what you’ve done?
To note the earth below the collapse
and the sky above it, light piercing
the gloom and colors born of its shafts,
and greet the other rubble people rising,
shaking dust from their shirt,
weeping, believing
and starting again?
Your granddaughter, your namesake
You were in your last days
and you’d open your eyes
and say you were tired.
We said, Sleep, and
We’re going for a walk.
I didn’t like that it was wet in the woods,
but there were acorns,
and that, she said, was what you did together –
make dolls of them, and sew.
Once she made pants. When she
thought she was, she said, I’m done,
but you said no.
You pulled stitches and fixed the seam.
You wouldn’t stop till you got it right.
Which is what you’re doing now, she said:
piecing the past and pulling tight the seam.
