Author: admin

Letters, be the memory of this moment,
Ruth’s 3-legged Golden Lab
sniffing for news beneath the hedge,
grass glittering with rain,
the bird feeder mangled by our car.

Years from now I want to remember
how we walked the splendid earth
and saw it.  When children read this
and smile at its old fashioned vision,
then words, stubborn little boxcars

lugging meaning across the rickety
wooden bridge to the future, hold,
hold.  Couple against time, bear
the red geranium, the slender birch—
you, sentences–glitter against

the massive dark of nothing.  Tell
of feet that buffed this doorsill
till it gleams, of cartwheeling
children.  Remember the Rosetta
stone, the hum of Xerox machines,

remember monks copying, how
a prisoner in solitary picked up
a pebble to scribble stories
on the wall.  Letters, I tell you,
even if your paper yellows in the attic,

even if it’s torn and thrown into the sea,
each of you separate from your brothers,
swim through the ocean, row across
the sky, walk through the wasteland,
find a reader.  Stay together.  Hold. 

Sunlight is breaking into colors around me
     like a catastrophe I can neither
          shake nor explain–  
how the sun’s gold finger
     dusts the tops of maples.
          How the maple’s articulate roots 
wrestle with dumb earth. 
     How our houses, breaking free of foliage,
          stare candidly at one another’s naked bodies.
Time washes all the bridges out, dismembers
     the maples, expires like a parking meter.
          We check and recheck our watches and
pay costly tickets anyway. 
     Yet look what a little thing can defeat time.
          I made this from bits of salvage–
my own breath
     and a few second-hand words.

               –In appreciation of Maxim Gorky at
                 the International convention of Atheists.
                 1929

Like Gorky, I sometimes follow my doubts
outside and question the metal sky,
longing to have the fight settled, thinking
I can’t go on like this, and finally I say

all right, it is improbable, all right, there
is no God.  And then as if I’m focusing
a magnifying glass on dry leaves, God blazes up.
It’s the attention, maybe, to what isn’t

there that makes the notion flare like
a forest fire until I have to spend the afternoon
spraying it with the hose to put it out.  Even
on an ordinary day when a friend calls,

tells me they’ve found melanoma,
complains that the hospital is cold, I whisper, God.
God, I say as my heart turns inside out.
Pick up any language by the scruff of its neck,

wipe its face, set it down on the lawn,
and I bet it will toddle right into the godfire
again, which–though they say it doesn’t
exist—can send you straight to the burn unit. 

Oh, we have only so many words to think with. 
Say God’s not fire, say anything, say God’s
a phone, maybe.  You know you didn’t order a phone,
but there it is.  It rings.  You don’t know who it could be. 

You don’t want to talk, so you pull out
the plug.  It rings.  You smash it with a hammer
till it bleeds springs and coils and clobbered up
metal bits.  It rings again.  You pick it up

and a voice you love whispers hello.

                                                                –for Don Murdoch
 
This is the end of the world, slow motion, this burning,
             burning till earth is parched, the cypress crisping,
                          cactus brown, brown grass, brown horizon.
 
Through the Cathedral hands of the faithful pass a candle.
             Feel the pull of prayer in the hot dark.
                          Tell God nothing can live without water,
 
water, which is 70% of what you’re praying with,
             rivers longing through you for more water.
                          That’s when it comes to you:
 
in prayer lies prayer’s answer.  In the calling out,
             the visitation.  In the arrow lives the target’s eye.
                          So water rises from its knees, believing water
                             
will come.  When rain starts, a fat drop
             joined by her sisters, the sound of dripping like
                          a shy nun sneezing, your heart stops with pleasure
 
and you pick up the cantaloupe you’ll have for dinner                                                      
             to shake it.  The promise inside:  flesh
                          the color of sunset, the slosh of a whole ocean.