A CALL IN THE NIGHT

 

What to make, then, of this lone bird calling out, long before the first glimmer of morning light? Maybe she has dreamed a human dream, I think, and woke in a terrible fright. Or maybe, like all of us, she just wanted to make sure that the world was still here. She hears the sound of her own voice echoing, one small proclamation among the silence of leaves and stars, her voice declaring only her own bird-ness. She feels the breeze, the air shifting imperceptibly around her song, feels the breath of something larger stirring in the dark. And she is at ease once again.

HAIRCUT

 

There was a time when you would

never have let her get this close,

a time when neither of you could be in

the same room for more than a moment.

Her touch was not of your concern,

her words no longer yours to decipher.

But you have no one else to ask

to help with this most ordinary of tasks;

so here you sit, pale and shirtless

in the porcelain chill of bathroom light

as she trims and snips, seemingly

at random, cautiously maneuvering

the electric trimmer across the contours

of your skull, rounding the arches

above your ears, stepping back to consider,

then moving closer, as a lover might

that moment just before a first kiss.

You will not speak of this as an intimacy.

You will manage a simple Thank you,

reaching quickly for the worn shirt

hanging haphazardly from the radiator,

as if suddenly realizing that you were late

for one appointment or another, or that

something you could not quite name

had startled you into movement.

USED RECORD STORE

 

You can smell the basements of long ago

here within these cardboard sleeves,

slender spines creased and breaking apart,

can almost feel the dampness seeping through

the cold cinder blocks, stale cigarette smoke

and voices turned suddenly into ghosts.

You can hold the shroud of another world

half-awake, waiting to be rediscovered,

can wander aimlessly the long, narrow aisles,

the way you did when you were still a kid,

hungry for any sign of life to find you.

You thought those songs would last forever,

the way summer did in every chorus,

repeating endlessly into a silence not quite.

You thought that girl who taught you

to kiss would stay just a moment longer.

the sound of her laughter like the incantation

of something just beyond your reach.

You are still searching, thumbing the racks

for something you may have missed,

still looking and listening for a message

that has taken so long to find you.

BROTHER SONG

 

Brother, have you at last earned

the peace and solitude

which somehow eluded you

on this side of the earth?

Perhaps you speak now in ways

I cannot hope to understand:

the repeating parentheses

of gently falling snow,

insistent pulse of a birch tapping

against the window glass,

sudden shock of a crow wing torn

and frozen to the sidewalk.

You, who saved up your words

like trinkets for a rainy day,

offer no reply but this,

the space you have shaped

in your former image.

Or perhaps your silence has

become your song at last,

the one you had been secretly

rehearsing all along.

THE MISSING FINGER

 

(for Nels Natus, 1896-1959)

In one version, your grandfather walks

purposely through the gently rustling field,

his steps only slightly wider than usual,

jaw clenched, mouth pulled inward,

holding in one upheld hand the finger

which the shears have suddenly removed.

In the barn, the sheep wait, perplexed,

half-kneeling, dark blood not their own

already seeping into damp wood and straw.

In another telling, he angles the gun

as though it were another limb, one eye

closed to the world of dancing summer leaves,

of soft breezes and silent water winding

back upon itself. He is an easy target

for himself, the burnt smell of flesh strangely

familiar, as the war draft notice flutters

on the kitchen linoleum, nearly rising into flight.

No one is left now to remember, or to claim

this as anything other than simple curiosity.

Yet in your mind's eye you can clearly see him,

his worn denim sleeve waving tentatively

to someone in the distance, someone whom

he cannot make out, his face nearly concealed

by a passing cloud of sepia and dust.

But you know it's him by what is missing,

the way the moonlight slashes through

unexpectedly -- once, then again.

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.