A Flickering Light
Why so much time
before I grasped
its place in my life?
Before I understood
the possibility
to bend and stretch,
fold it into poems,
stories, save it
for dark seasons,
follow it north or south,
depending upon month
and hemisphere, or
simply keep it in some
mind pocket until
needed to deflect
the dark.
As a child in thrall
to midsummer light,
enough to bicycle
home at nine o’clock,
with no thought about
the slant of it to come
as days shorten and insects
grow frantic and shrill
about sex and death,
I thought I could use it
all up, the euphoria,
reserve nothing for later.
Now I have mastered
the art, or perhaps trick,
of parsing it out
in lesser portions
to make it last,
the way a flickering light
can trick the eye to see it
as a constant, and knowing
this may be the antidote
to everything.
Moulin
Take the time to walk back to the Pleistocene.
Just off the highway between Jasper and Banff,
park the car to board a snow bus that deposits
you on the ice field, where you can guzzle
glacial meltwater from a moulin—water
with the purity that preceded your species.
Pay attention, or you could tumble into
a crevasse from which you would not emerge
until the ice has melted. Kneel down, touch
the glacial tongue with reverence. But know
that you violate it. Consider that it recedes
and loses depth beneath your body, that
it may disappear within the life of your child.
Let the ice pierce a hole in you even as it melts.
Fur Beethoven from Elise
You ruined me for other men,you know. I have been loved
by others more handsome than you,
with gentle touch and pretty words.
But each time I begin to fall,
your teasing eighth notes
that presage the melody
course through me to intervene.
It was a trifle for you, your A minor
Bagatelle with its little arcs and bridges
always coming back to that winsome lyric—
forever implanted in my body and brain—
a theme that never fully resolves,
like my feelings for you.
Your publisher got my name wrong
(due to your terrible handwriting).
Elise does not exist,
though she will outlive me
to taunt generations of piano students
who will love or hate her for
testing them, making fun of their
imperfect playing—
much as you did to me.
I could never possess you or you me,
yet because of that little piece—
dashed off in an hour, no doubt—
we will stay forever linked,
what we both wanted, I believe.
To Michelangelo’s Dying Slave
No pain mars your marble face,your pose almost erotic, left arm
flung back behind your head,
right hand fingering the spear
slit in your chest, one knee bent,
your David-like face tilted
slightly away from us, eyes
shut. Your vision inward,
release on your face
as you die at your peak.
Your body still radiates
desire, like a new star,
even as you enter that space
beyond desire—
as if you hear a melody
like the Liebestod,
composed 300 years after
your dying was carved,
that one-time song
when love and death
meld before the end.
If you could speak,
you would tell us
nothing.
SELECTED POEMS from The Dead Spirits at the piano
MANO SINISTRA
I have carried mother’s tattered
Schubert sonatas, impromptus,
fantasias back and forth
to piano lessons. Bought
before I was born, binding
held by tape, its cover
and pages leave paper crumbs
on walkways, in cars, on pianos.
For months, I have struggled
with the B flat major Sonata,
composed two months before
his young death; its broad
reaches exceed mine, as I recall
how mother’s long fingers
handled them with ease.
Here, my teacher says, skip
to the Andante movement –
it’s astounding, and you can do it.
He shows me how it is played:
the left hand, mano sinistra,
crossing over the right to touch
the upper octave ever so lightly,
a sound you can barely hear
but feel that you have heard it.
As he plays, I hear mother
fifty years ago at her piano,
while in the next room,
I read, solved math problems,
daydreamed my future;
mother giving voice
to Schubert’s sense of death,
me absorbing both of them,
but barely so, not knowing it.
I rush home to her piano, now mine,
so we can play Schubert,
mourn him a little,
the two of us, together.
SONNET FOR THE DEAD
Strange how they return to play
leading roles in dreams, or pass through a room
in daylight, look unchanged, and pause to say,
as they did before: It’s not as bad as you think.
As though they cannot quite let go of you, or the life
where nothing is easy, except death. As though
the new state is too ethereally flat and plain,
lacking the hard edges of conflict, choice.
Or do we have it all wrong? Perhaps they drift, cirrus-
like and give us not a glance or thought, have blotted out
those of us still wrapped in skin, who check the time.
Have they cut us loose? – to replay their voices like favorite
sonatas, as we try to hold them in relationships with a name,
that are bound by blood, as though the blood still flowed.
THE BURREN
More like a moon than earth,
Stark limestone landscape,
Glacier gouged and scraped.
A portal tomb holds balance,
As it has for six thousand years,
Over bones of a people who did not know
They were the early act of an Irish saga;
Or that cutting all the trees would erode
The soil that sustained them, down
To this slippery rock where only tough
Wildflowers survive in the fissures; or
How differing visions of God would blight
This island forever. We tiptoe gingerly.
IN ROME WITH JOHN KEATS
In the small room where you died,
I stand at the end of a narrow bed,
as perhaps you did on better days,
stare out the window at Bernini’s boat
still sinking on the Piazza di Spagna.
And had you not been so weak,
his marble boat, like the Elgin Marbles,
might have sparked another ode or sonnet
on mortality – a new metaphor
for the life slowly leaving you.
In those last days, to which poem
did you turn for comfort?
I would guess the Nightingale –
your darkling singing to you
in full throated summer ecstasy
out of the embalming dark, in high
requiem for a coming February death.
Or could it be the urn? – with lovers
on the brink, like you and Fanny,
bliss always out of reach.
Nothing is left of your time here
but Severn’s death-bed portrait –
tendrils of hair damp on your forehead,
lids shut, candles throwing shadows
on your face, still perfect at the end.
Though they burned all you touched,
in a bonfire below, you linger here listening
for footsteps on the stairs, horses on the square,
mandolin players on the Spanish steps,
the poem in the blood rising in your throat.