Late

A Plath, a Rimbaud, a Keats, a Crane—

A Li He, for that matter, from long

Before any of them—dying young

Enough that the death is part of it,

The impressiveness of all the things

Done—as, say, recently, Max Ritvo—

They all settle strangely in the mind,

Their completeness enhanced by a claim

To incompleteness, although often

No more fragmented than the whole heft

Of works seen as representative

Of fully lived poetic careers.

In blue-grey heaven’s thunder-stone script,

There are no verses and no poets

And no need of any of our gifts.

Writers are not being called away

To compose for a greater kingdom.

They are wrung out, like all other flesh.

But is there an acceleration,

Possibly, created on approach

Of the breath-summoning red dragon?

This desert’s evening sky holds no shade

In any discernible palate.

It’s bare—neither white, nor blue, nor grey—

A brutally languorous twilight.

I can only hope there’s something left

It can wring from a bony old chest.

Longing Afternoon

In my more distant house of dust I heard

The words I hid were speaking for themselves,

But here we only speak of plagues and worse,

The rot at the heart of aspiration,

The noble selfishness of selflessness,

The abstract signs and banners of humans

Driven to distraction by each other—

Life’s latest self-debriding tournaments.

Oh, for when we were little words, the light

On the leaves that tapped at shuttered windows,

When we were rhythms made by winds that had no ears,

And never hurt for what we heard we’d never hear.

Even If We Thought We Killed Everything, Something Would Still Eat the Corpses

It’s strange to read a poet

Writing in a time of war

Or other calamity

Who does not give us the war

Or sieve the calamity

In any vivid detail—

What is wrong with this poet?

Cowardice? Complicity?

Some kind of moral vacuum?

Is this justifiable

By terror of censorship,

Traditions of the genre?

Does this writer simply lack

The genius, the resources

To rise to the occasion?

When life sets down to a feast

Of exceptional malice,

With heaps of mortality

And lashings of destruction,

Who does not describe the meal?

Who questions life’s conditions?

Balancing in the Wind

A sunny Friday morning

In the drought-stricken suburbs

Of the southwestern desert,

And the plague has not yet killed

One person in this county,

Having sickened a thousand,

And the sprinklers are working,

And the wind is in the leaves,

And robins hop on the wall,

And the traffic is steady

Out by the dusty highway

Where construction continues

On a new subdivision,

And the reservoir’s lower

But it hasn’t dried up yet,

And the hospital is full,

But a check of morning news

Says no, no one’s died there yet—

Well, of course people have died,

But at least not from the plague,

And water runs from the tap.

Start When You See It’s Me

In the unearthly shadow

Of an angel like a tree,

Giant as an alien

Monster disguised as a tree,

I can catch a glimpse of you

As I am and as you’ll be,

Your forehead lined, your hair white,

Worn long, not one drop of dye,

Waiting for me to visit

You somewhere in memory.

That shadow has a substance,

Rippling with dark leaves, black wings.

It’s haunted. It’s not empty.

I can feel it protect you

When you shyly turn your eyes,

Then start when you see it’s me.

Avoiding the Plague in a Drought

We are the words, not the poet.

We are the terms of surrender.

We dream of naming the colors

If our host lives to September.

Afternoon burns the dust-green leaves

Of the irrigated peaches

Of gold and rusty grievances,

Enormous weights on their branches.

We’ve never been spoken aloud,

Never in this exact sequence.

We’re thought’s skeletons, clothing, clouds

Without moisture or existence.

In the corners of the backyard,

Shed leaves confuse the spiderwebs,

While in the house, a fly tries hard

Not to starve close to loaves of bread.

Where Did You Go?

In a time of too much conjured light,

Who would notice a single candle

Guttering under a shade at night?

Easy to miss the face beside it,

That serious look that drops away

From a quiet conversation lit

More by the voices than by the light,

But there are no street lamps by this yard,

And the world is dark enough tonight.