Series: Morning Porch Poems: Autumn 2014

Last week, seven bags that I raked
of what the wind, the dark, the late
hour at this time of year detached
from trees that ring the backyard—

Today our small plot of earth
once more is carpeted end to end:
pine straw and layers of their thick,
wet pelt. It seems impossible

to keep up now with all the ruined
wealth they shed, to put a stop
to this red and gold display of their
indifference, reflected still in every

window— And I know it will not matter,
but anyway I gather my anguish back in, drag
the implement’s teeth across the ground;
blink back my tears in the cold, bright light.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

No one is late: only present
to the need particular
to her own circumstances.

And each in his own time
forages for what is
already here—

hidden in plain view,
without restrictions,
though strewn among

the rocky surfaces.
No one is more worthy,
no one less beautiful.

All hunger
for this world goes
by the same name.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

She rubbed ointment across the darkening patch on her ankle, feeling the itch beneath the burn.

*

Some miniatures take months, sometimes years, to complete. One must ponder the weight and shape of what is missing, before the outline can be imagined.

*

She wrote of receiving in the mail pots of aloe, pots of African violets— propagated by friends from original plants once tended by her son before he passed away.

*

It is astonishing, how anger and hurt behave— leave in them too long the impress of your fingers and they will adorn every space in the room.

*

Honey on the tongue, bitterness in the heart. Soon the grammar of venomous bees in each ear.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

On the sheet, the child renders
a house with crayons: tilted roof,

fence, yard, the figures that make up
the family— The mother and father

are taking a nap. Or they are out.
Then a room— curtained over

with blue or black, disguised
by the steam from the iron

and the starch on the clothes—
where something happens for which

she has no words at the time: the uncle
wants to play doctor, to conduct

an examination— Neither did she
have words for doubt, suspicion,

the tingle in the parts that burned.
There are words whose meanings she’ll

mull over all her life: rupture
in her head, lesion on her tongue,

having come to their true disclosures.
When she says them now, she is like

the meter reader, gauging from month
to month the cost of what was used.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

of the hidden, that gleam
constellations away, without
any known name for it here?
And what could we know
of the answer that arrives
as faint echo, lighthouse
beam cutting through fog
in some millennium where we
might still after all be
mortal, shipwrecked, if not
for what love deposited
in these bones?

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

You say you do not remember
the things we used to do
together— We counted the hundred
and some steps that led to the cathedral,
holding our breath from near vertigo
on descent. The boys that sold
lottery tickets loitered along the edge
of the overlook, tempting fate
at the same time that they sold dreams
cheap, if by the dozen. I was ashamed
one summer to wear the shoes
made to correct the uncanny
curvature of my back. And so I believed
you then when you said I should find
the filament in the center
of the spider’s web, roll it
between my thumb and forefinger,
swallow it like a pill. We circled
the neighborhood streets like strays
intent on finding the map to places
where wildness was still spoken,
a language not yet extinct.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Like a clay pot parched
for water, I’ll open
myself again to the rain.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.