IN THE ABSENCE OF

 

Lately, my daughter has been having brief episodes of leaving this world. What were once generally referred to as spells. Or perhaps, it is the world that is turning away, walking past her periphery and into nothingness. The world of things simply needing a moment to collect itself. The world of images suddenly with nothing new to offer. Perhaps she is discovering, as she must, that the universe is made mostly of absence, that form is yet another emptiness, and emptiness that which we perceive as form. "Just now," she says, "when I was talking to you, for a minute I couldn't see or hear you." "But I was right here," I remind her, "Even when you thought I had gone away." I want her to remember this, many years from now, want her to rest easy in the absence I have created solely for her.

GHAZAL LOOKING EAST, THEN WEST

I come from a language that has no future tense,

where love itself is measured simply by standing still.

My mother's ancestors brought bad habits but good songs,

their hungry ghosts lingering around the whiskey still.

You told me once that loyalty was a defect of character.

My heart is a three-legged dog following you still.

Perhaps it's not love if something doesn't get broken.

When everything shatters, even the world becomes still.

My daughter spied a dolphin in the Mississippi last week.

A child's eye can do that, can hold a great river still.

We listen closely to the arguments of winter crows,

the air between each shriek all the more still.

My thoughts weren't all that interesting, so I let them go.

They wore themselves out, pretending to be still.

MATHEMATICS

 

My scalp prickled with tiny beads of anxiety. Everyone had left school but me, and Mr. Heaney, who hovered like an unwelcome shadow, rising occasionally from his desk, hands clasped behind his back, his New Balance sneakers silent in their slow, measured steps. The blackboard had been wiped clean, dark as the night sky, only a few ghostly wisps of another world showing through. I was trying and failing, trying and failing, at long division, the paper wearing through from my endless corrections. "The universe is made of numbers," I was told again and again. "You must know this, if you are to know anything." I did not doubt this, though it was a language the Creator had somehow chosen to keep from me. I labored on as the afternoon light gradually shifted, and the clock ticked out its seconds, each with a small sense of finality. I could imagine the invisible threads connecting all things, though I gave them neither name nor meaning. I could hear the voices of summer outside rising and falling, could almost make out the words that elicited their sudden laughter, though it all seemed, in those moments, to be light years away.

SAYING GRACE

 

When we were kids, we folded our

small peasant hands, freshly washed,

into imaginary cathedrals, mouthing

the humble words as instructed

to our invisible father, his earthly son,

and, strangely, a ghost which we

could only presume to be benevolent.

We prayed in earnest, though sometimes

in haste or with unappreciated humor,

prayed beneath that familiar painting

of an old man, also in prayer, weary

yet grateful for his daily crust of bread.

He seemed somehow holy, and yet

as ordinary as any among us.

I wondered if he might offer up one

on behalf of us poor sinners, who

always seemed on the cusp of eviction,

of fleeing again by cover of night,

our offerings too small to be noticed,

our debts to the Lord, and to those

who claimed to be in his service, unpaid.

GHAZAL WRITTEN ON A SMALL PATCH OF WINTER SKY

 

That indescribable blue after a winter storm

reminded me of you, your eyes filled with distance.

What could I have said to keep you here longer,

when what I say now must reach through every distance?

God does not speak our language or write us letters,

our words merely fragments thrown into great distance.

There is a strange joy in singing deliberately off-key.

Any singing we can manage is a way to close the distance.

When I was younger, I walked without second thought.

Now, my bones upon waking remind me of each distance.

It's a kind of blessing to let each loss have its say.

Not all of us live to sign our names upon that distance.

Still, I never meant to say to let go of this world, brother.

Forgive me. You know I can never fill such a distance.