ELEGY FOR MY NIECE

 

I was surprised that you came to visit

that morning in my dream, having departed

this world so suddenly only days before;

but there you were, lying peacefully outside

the plate glass window of that musty basement

apartment I had not entered in years.

Your eyes were bright and smiling, bearing

no weight or bruising from within,

no residue of the earthly sorrow which you tried

continually to numb, to bury, to exchange

for another's on the installment plan

of what became your life. You were just a kid

at that moment, as you had always been,

lounging without care in the long summer grass,

nothing but sunlight and time holding you.

Yet when I stepped slowly toward you,

you floated backward, pulled like a stage prop,

the space between us immovable, solid

as a body neither of us could see or lay claim to;

and when I reached to touch the glass

you were already gone, carried on waves

of what I could not know or save you from.

Dear niece, dear Ophelia, forgive my absence,

for staying on this dry island of earth,

as if these long silent roads were my own,

as if I had any idea where any of them

might eventually lead.

JASPER

 

When I was a kid, I felt invisible more often

than not -- sometimes through a combination

of will and imagination, and sometimes

through the unseeing eyes of adults,

voices prone to shouting, from the kitchen

or the living room, "Get those kids

out of here! I can't hear myself think."

It was good, then, to have a vanishing act,

to know when to slip away, and when to stay gone.

Now that I am growing older,

gray, unassuming, fumbling for

my reading glasses, I again

feel myself becoming part of the unseen

or what my mother and aunts

used to refer to as a Jasper,

that eternal stranger passing through, ostensibly

harmless, whose name no one could recall.

There's no loneliness like a crowd,

and while this is neither comfort

not revelation, it is not without advantages.

In the coffee shop, I order without

small talk, I sit, off to the side, sketching a few words

the way an artist might sketch

a tree, a cloud, a figure in the distance

a world I may enter, as I always have, disturbing

no one in my coming or going.

WITHOUT

 

Some absences

take up so much room;

some silences

have grown too large

to leave the way

they came in.

CIRCLE ROUTES

 

The Canada geese this morning

are plodding in weary circles

along the side of the road,

one after the other, waiting for

this gray Autumn rain to lift

to begin their long flight

back to where they started from.

SECONDHAND

 

I suppose that I should have been more grateful

for the everyday lessons in transience,

the irrefutable truth that nothing in this life

is ever ours to begin with, only on loan,

and that the end result of all this accumulation

is, inevitably, dispersal. But when you're a kid,

and coolness matters most, the tell-tale uniform

of the poor weighs upon your shoulders

and limbs, the shushing sound of those shapeless

polyester pants, as if you were being erased,

your movements tentative, your steps slightly out of sync.

Nothing ever seemed to fit quite right,

as my own form seemed ill-suited for its design,

growing up and out, lumbering from room

to quiet room, from one pulse of air to another.

But the dog-eared books, yellowing already,

the worn and scuffed record albums

handed down from an older brother or sister

were always a blessing, tangible portals

to a thousand different realms, lives both mysterious

and mundane, which I could add to my own,

wandering through it all unscathed.

The teachers, with few exceptions, took

little notice, handed me down to the next level

of learning, and the next. My mother, too,

seemed already worn out with it all,

hardly interested in raising any of us, eager

to pass us down to a world hovering between

ambivalence and constant danger.

But we had been studying, albeit humbly,

unnoticed, shifting in and out of view, letting go

again and again. We would be ready.