The song
sparrow puts all his
saying
into one
repeated song:
what
variations, subtleties
he manages,
to encompass denser
meanings, I’ m
too coarse
to catch: it’ s
one song, an over-reach
from which
all possibilities,
like filaments,
depend:
killing,
nesting, dying,
sun or cloud,
figure up
and become
song — simple, hard:
removed.
I know if I find you I will have to leave the earth
and go on out
over the sea marshes and the brant in bays
and over the hills of tall hickory
and over the crater lakes and canyons
and on up through the spheres of diminishing air
past the blackset noctilucent clouds
where one wants to stop and look
way past all the light diffusions and bombardments
up farther than the loss of sight
into the unseasonal undifferentiated empty stark
I found a
weed
that had a
mirror in it
and that
mirror
looked in at
a mirror
in
me that
had a
weed in it
It doesn't
matter
to me
if
poems mean
nothing:
there's no
floor
to the
universe
and yet
one
walks the
floor.
I don’ t know somehow it seems sufficient
to see and hear whatever coming and going is,
losing the self to the victory
of stones and trees,
of bending sandpit lakes, crescent
round groves of dwarf pine:
for it is not so much to know the self
as to know it as it is known
by galaxy and cedar cone,
as if birth had never found it
and death could never end it:
the only parts of the body the same
size at birth as they’ ll always be.
“That’ s why all babies are beautiful,”
Thurber used to say as he grew
blind — not dark, he’ d go on
to explain, but floating in a pale
light always, a kind of candlelit
murk from a sourceless light.
He needed dark to see:
There’ s a crack in this glass so fine we can’ t see it,
and in the blue eye of the candleflame’ s needle
there’ s a dark fleck, a speck of imperfection
that could contain, like a microchip, an epic
treatise on beauty, except it’ s in the eye of the beheld.
And at the base of our glass there’ s nothing
Haze. Three student violists boarding
a bus. A clatter of jackhammers.
Granular light. A film of sweat for primer
and the heat for a coat of paint.
A man and a woman on a bench:
she tells him he must be psychic,
for how else could he sense, even before she knew,
that she’ d need to call it off? A bicyclist
fumes by with a coach’ s whistle clamped
I wondered if the others felt
as heroic
and as safe: my unmangled family
slept while I slid uncertain feet ahead
behind my flashlight’ s beam.
Stones, thick roots as twisted as
a ruined body,
what did I fear?
I hoped my batteries
had eight more lives
than the lost child.
I feared I’ d find something.
Rather than hold his hands properly
arched off the keys, like cats
with their backs up,
Monk, playing block chords,
hit the keys with his fingertips well
above his wrists,
shoulders up, wrists down, scarce
room for the pencil, ground
freshly to a point,
piano teachers love to poke
into the palms of junior
pianists with lazy hands.
