My son lies beneath the leaves,
And I must join him,
To bear him again,
His heart fluttering in my womb
Like a lark’s tongue trilling
At approaching dawn.
I will rock him in my rocking chair
Even when the earth has been swallowed
Beneath my feet.

Yet Venus still sails close to fatal beauty
Every sunrise and sunset.
I still watch the young crazed for one another
As if pursued by hornets:
They dive into swift currents to be carried off
God knows where.
The great blue heron still lopes overhead
In a silence that rends my heart,
And the violin still makes me weep
For all living things.

This morning I awoke next to a shell,
Split along its length.
Whatever I have become,
My skin is tender to the chill of a cloud
Passing across the sun.

Nov 5th, 2009

No, it’s not the same —
A mother grieves for her son
Marching off to war,
Laughing and singing with his friends.
A man’s grief is the sun pouring ox-blood
On the sea surface,
Then on the shore,
Then on the mountains.

Miners emerging smudged and sweaty
From shafts a mile deep know grief.
The veins of grief are as deep as you want to dig,
Veins that are pillars of our planet,
There from creation.

A man stands in the shallow sea
Clutching a rope in the breakers.
His tears mix with the salt sea.
At the end of his rope is silence,
Even his dead son stops speaking,
Even the factory stops pounding and screeching.

The poet in his room realizes
He will never see his parents or the Andes again.
He knows he will die in April one rainy day, young,
With Sacré Coeur a dream beyond the bleary pane.

The Inuit artist in his room drops the scissors again
And cannot pull the needle through the cloth.
The eight stubs and two fingers can no longer cope.
He gives his sewing tools to an Inuit school.
At night he says in his language,
“It is completed”,
Then climbs onto his bed as if boarding an ice floe.

I will plane planks
And chisel mortises and tenons,
I will measure carefully and make my pencil marks.
For the rest of my days I will build coffins for prisoners and the poor,
For men found dead under bridges or stabbed in alleyways,
And smaller ones for runaway children.
I will awake to the smell of sawdust,
I will pound grief, saw grief, shape grief,
Curse grief, laugh at grief, harangue grief,
And be satisfied with grief.

November 13th, 2009

This poem is about love,
Or rather separation.
The young man must leave
His valley of honeysuckle and strong horses,
Of sweet grass and wine the color of oxblood.
His lover watches him walk
The road to the forest,
She sees him turn his head homeward.
Rapt in his gaze he stumbles,
But he continues
Till he vanishes into the trees.

He is my son,
On his way into the forest
To face some ordeal,
Perhaps the Green Knight
With his broadsword,
Gleaming and sharp.
I have given my son
Mountain herbs in a bundle.
I have bound it with a string,
I have pulled the string tight
With all my might.

I am old and my hands are gnarled,
But I wove for his neck a collar
With every bit of my love,
Till I have no more love to give.
At first I could hear him singing
From within the dark wood,
But now I sit at the roadside
Waiting like a rough hewn stone
Placed upright in the soil of Andalucia.

February 5th, 2009

You said, “I felt your presence.”
And it’s true, we complete each other’s sentences.
For us, a word is a complex thought.
If fact, you are a word,
One of those words in a poem,
Resonating with layer upon layer of meaning,
Like the tone of church bells in Russia,
Rolling in waves over the steppe.

On an autumn night,
Cold and black,
I hear young men shout and laugh,
And I feel the utter loneliness of being,
As if I were in a farmhouse on a prairie,
Watching the fence posts vanish in a blizzard.
But you said, “I felt your presence.”

February 14th, 2009

The woman who loves you

Dwells in the falls at Iguaçú
And her tears tumble in torrents.
She sends parrots of indigo with flashes of gold,
Tucans with orange bills,
Birds that are emeralds,
They are waiting for you now,
Sitting in the trees and on the wires,
Squawking impatiently, pacing,
Outside your window in Rio.
Your outstretched arms will become parrot wings,
The birds will lift you and carry you
Your back ablaze with yellow and violet,
Carry you to Iguaçú.
They let you go and you float to the rainbows,
The rainbow words whisper
Anda logo, o meu Amador! Hurry! Take me away!

February 28th, 2009

For Norman

His days could fit in a seashell,
His heart —
Ask his thousand friends.

March 3rd, 2009

In the distance the cone of the volcano,
Snow-clad, its smoke trailing above the horizon,
A ship steaming across the desert.
Below, the field of maize,
And below that, the cemetery with its cactus
And desert flowers, extra bright.
Beyond weeping we carry the child’s coffin,
The musicians weeping for us with their trumpets.

March 14th, 2009

What is the meaning of being an old man,
If it is not to be a grandfather?
I’d forgotten that weight,
A whole human being condensed
In that warm heft.
Внучка! There, you are baptized
With your first Russian word,
And I wrap you now in melodies
—you know, it all started with melodies:
A century ago a Russian choirmaster
Found himself directing in Belgrade’s cathedral —
That was the way things were in those days —
Then I came along and my parents
Wrapped me in choruses and arias.
I sang, danced and played
Here, there and everywhere,
And now I hold you, feeling
A stranger in your world
That is spinning ever faster.

Across the Bay a new bridge is a-building,
The old span looking dignified
Like a classic film noir.
Look, there’s where a T-33 hit it in the fog
And bent and blackened a cantilever beam.
Sleek, minimalist, the new bridge
Hovers over the waters,
Without a history.

March 24th, 2009

A mother’s love is in the curves,
In the corrugations of the seashell,
In the gathered muscles of the body of Neptune,
In the round breasts and flaring hips of Nereids,
Even in the checkered cloths that
Flutter on the café tables,
Here at the Piazza Navona,
And in my fingers that encircle my son’s wrist,
Squirming to break loose and explore.

Then he is gone,
A dolphin racing below the surface of the crowd,
Flitting among feet and legs,
Invisible and fleet.
People, laughing and talking all at once,
Absorbed in the sunshine and statues,
Are his element,
Indifferent as waves.
Vanished, like
An undiscovered empire beneath the sands.
My cries are drowned by the rumble of speech,
Cresting and crashing.

      But a mother’s love is also
In the curves of the narrow lanes
Of this ancient city.
Suddenly, there he is,
Washed ashore on my feet,
Hot and breathless,
Smiling with a boy’s devilment.

I have a small church built,
With one dome, dedicated to
The Madonna of Lost Sons.
I lift him to light a taper of thanksgiving.
Every Sunday he is at my side.
He grows taller, taller even than the tapers, till
One day I watch him
Circumambulate the dome with his bride,
Her crown of lemon flowers
Calling down Aphrodite.

I watch the procession recede
As water recedes in neap season,
But I stay behind to quench the tapers
Between thumb and forefinger,
And to lock the church doors.
The newlyweds and revelers
Are already far in the distance.

July 4th, 2009

The Night Watchman

Night has dawn by the throat,
Holding her under a black lagoon.
The wind would bring death if it could,
Howling down the frozen wasteland.

My uniform says I should be haranguing peasants
From the balcony of the Presidential Palace.
And my hat is heartbreaking,
Like Laertes’ goat-skin cap
As the suitors eat up his substance
And Penelope weaves his shroud.

Our lunchroom is lit like a container port,
The table legs are uneven,
The reading amounts to legal notices,
And the vending machine hums just to annoy us.

We gossip, we joke, talk about nothing in a colorful way,
Speculate, then go our separate ways,
Rattling doorknobs,
Swishing disinfectant in urinals,
Polishing miles of linoleum corridors.

Now a distant glow-worm crawls toward me.
Inside, the faces, mostly brown and black,
Of men and women swallowed alive.

My vinyl bag holds a cold thermos
And heavy-soled shoes, for we stand shift after shift.
Before I too am swallowed,
Let my hand reach for dawn’s throat
That I might strangle her.

July 30th, 2009

The road is steep and narrow,
And my legs are weak.
On all sides devils urge me
To rest, to sleep,
But the sun is already low.

Sweet Jesus, take me upon your shoulders,
Broad and confident,
High above the incessant demons!
And lo, Jesus took me up.
His strides were long and easy,
He carried me like a papoose.

He set me down on the mountaintop,
And in every direction was dense green.
Here and there rose in straight, thin lines
The smoke of cookfires.

I saw a vast field of golden wheat,
And each ear had a human face.
Jesus wielded his great scythe
And he cut down a million stalks.

A wind came up,
Blowing the wheat high in the air,
While the chaff fell earthward.
The grains, each a soul, shot like comets
Into the firmament,
Each became a star.

The human chaff fell into the outstretched aprons
Of mothers and sisters and grandmothers.
Jesus stooped and blew the chaff aloft,
And a river of dust arose
And swirled across the Milky Way.

Down below, at every farmstead,
Cooks hammer bars of iron,
Calling their menfolk in from the fields.

August 9th 2009

Emptying Out

I am emptying out my house,
Sorting into boxes old letters,
Poems, learned articles (some signed),
Old books, financial statements,
Students’ papers and exams,
Boxes and boxes dragged out the door.
And furniture, too, old sticks
Half-broken and stained,
Line the curb.

My dear old friend has come to visit me,
His embrace light but firm,
I can feel his love like a current.
We sit on the two remaining chairs,
And talk into the night.
When we speak of loved ones
Now gone from life,
A white cloth flutters between us,
And when we speak of women
A blue fabric flows in the air.

But we need a more spiritual place,
So we face each other in a hogan,
A black stove in the center of the dome,
Its stovepipe piercing the arch.
Coffee and piñon scent the air,
As we huddle in blankets
And speak deep into the night.

In the morning we see it has snowed,
The sheep pens and arroyos are white,
The hills and the sierra dazzle in the sun.
There are already tracks in the snow,
Deer, rabbit and even the wide swath
Of a sidewinder headed underground.
But only one set of tracks counts:
Even now coyote stands, his fur ruffling in the wind,
The crystals of falling snow accumulating on his back.
He pants and waits.

August 28th, 2009