Wednesday, April 27, 2011

Miner's Cemetery: Atacama Desert, Chile



Whatever is put in Atacama
stays in Atacama —
a wreath of roses,
every petal intact
in perfect desiccation;
miners’ pine markers
untouched by rot or termite,
the wooden chapel’s planks
striated fossils,
unrusted nails a century old,
copper and tin communion cups
all but untarnished,
the last wine’s dregs
a crystal ring.

The graves are shallow,
the fence a mere
formality,
for no one comes here —
the miners’ mummies
will be miners’ mummies
till the sun grows cold.

One thousand miles
of desert coast
surround this graveyard,
the vast Pacific
begrudging one drop
of rainfall,

the only damp
at the cliff-edge
and off-shore islands,
the unceasing splatter
of guano,
gulls’ gift,
millennial deposits
a hundred yards thick,
the Andes’ answer
to Dover,

mined by coolies
for explosive nitrates,
then, as luck would have it,
the miners of Bolivia,
Peru and Chile followed
to dig the hard ground
of the desert flats
for the mountains’ run-off —
more nitrates, the Titan’s ichor,
without which guns
would be mere toys —
nitrates to fertilize
the sugar-beet fields
of pastry-mad Europe —

miners worked dead
in a place
where even their sweat
was stolen.

Rain comes, on average,
just once in forty years.
If you blink,
you miss it.
To the dead
it has the faintest sound,
like the turning of one page.

Tuesday, April 26, 2011

The Outcast

The boy is not like
    the others.
Their bikes ascend the hill,
storm down like whirlwinds.
He always walks,
  their wheels
   a dervish dance
whose physics baffle him.
He passes the practice field,
hopes no one will notice him
as he carries his books
on the way to the library

(they don't wear glasses,
    don't read anything
    between June and August).

He has no idea
    what their cries mean,
    why it matters
that a ball goes
    this way,
         that way.

When they let him join in,
    he runs with some older boys,
over a fence he can barely scale,
    watching for dogs that bite,
to the forbidden
    apple tree.


They climb to reach
    the great red ones.
From high above
    they taunt him,
dare him to join them
at the sky-scream treetop.


He stands below.
Climbing a tree
    is one of many things
    he's not allowed to do.
They talk about baseball
    and BB guns,
the cars they'll drive
when they're old enough,
the names of girls
whose breasts have swollen.

He reaches up
    for the lower branch
    takes unripe apples,
    unmarred by bird or worm.

Walking alone,
    he sees a daytime moon,
    wonders how Earth
    might look from its craters.

He goes home to his comics,
    to the attic room
    where aliens and monsters
    plan universal mayhem.

Don't eat those apples,
    his mother warns him.
They'll give you a stomach ache.

I like them, he says.
Green apples taste better.

Monday, April 25, 2011

When Did I Know

That I was the thing they don’t speak of,
whose nicknames even were unprintable?
Was it all the way back
at school’s beginning, when I knew
and could name the prettiest girl
in answer to my mother’s Who
would you marry
? but didn’t tell
that I could also rank the boys
in tiers of beauty, had anyone asked?

So many moments, so early:
When a boy cousin jumped on top of me
and said Let’s play husband and wife
twelve going on thirteen I had no idea
what that meant, except
it was the first time anyone touched
who wasn’t hitting me. Even through clothes
the feel of flesh on flesh made me tremble.

When my best friend, wrestling
me down on my narrow bed, asked
Why do you always let me win?
and I couldn’t answer.

When I stopped being alone, ever,
with my grandfather, who,
whiskered in his long underwear
would try to pin me down
with sadistic tickling on any day
the women were out of sight.
Because the body is a poem, mine
for my use and not another’s, mine
to discover its vocabulary.

When boys and girls huddled
hushed in a backyard tent,
a new game with much at stake,
showing their forbidden parts
by flashlight, I looked away
at the girls’ turn, then lay awake
remembering the slow unzip
of the boys’ trousers.

When one of the girls
it was dangerous to know
contrived a dozen ways
for me to walk her
through lonely places, woods,
even the night-time graveyard,
and I was a gentleman always.
(And when another, heaped
against me on the dance floor,
finally blurted despairingly,
Don’t my breasts interest you?)

When, as a seventh grader
on the first day of school I watched
in mingled horror/fascination
as senior boys emerged
from the gym class showers,
and then I dreamt of dark caverns
or a secret-passage attic
where all of them,
in an endless state of dressing,
undressing and self-caressing
lined up in an A to Z roll call,
slaves of my eyes’ hunger.

When I watched one after another
Godzilla and Toho monster films
and could not take my eyes off —
no, not the lumbering, costumed
monsters —  but Japanese men,
young ones, hard-cheeked,
dark-eyed and raven-haired,
an urge I could never plummet
to sated boredom.

And why, when I learned
that some men were otherwise inclined,
did my mouth not utter, ever,
the expletives? Surprised, delighted
even, each clue and glimmer
of a kindred species like a key shard,
a piece to be joined with other pieces
until the rainbow bridge could be completed,
my exit up and out of this
world I did not belong to.

If there had been a place to go
to meet them, I would have gone there.

But most of all is that starburst
explosion when you find the one face,
the one accepting glance, the one
surrendered night when all is given,
all asked-for taken with joy,
to know that the love given here
is as cosmic as any force in the universe,
to want and to be wanted by the same person.

I never asked to be normal.
Always and ever,
     for as long as I can remember
I was not like the others,
and the joy-quest yearning
was to find others
     equally blessed, equally scorned.
The names they call us
were nothing compared to the golden vowels,
the sibilants, the fluted song-tones
by which we would greet one another.

Somehow,
     in the dark of nightside passages,
and in the intervals of daylight
they grant us, we find our own,
either the fervent flesh-touch
of youth to youth, or the helping
hand of our elder kind, the lift
and repair of wings broken, hopes
not yet dashed by mortality.
We have our own biology and history.
Our children are the things we make,
our fossils the Trilobites of culture.
Try to imagine the world without us.

Sunday, April 24, 2011

Spring Earth


Somewhere it is always spring—
here, too, perhaps,
within these barren trees.
The thought, the idée fixe
the twig to be
outlasts the snowstorms.
Its double helix symphony
sleeps on in xylem,
unravels in sequestered leaves.
Some seeds refuse to sprout
until a winter has seasoned them,
as cunning monarchs outlive
their enemies.

Earth thaws.
Tendrils reach out
beneath me.
Seed’s urge unjackets me,
soaks me to root in run
   through falling rain.
I taste the sky,
    limestone and elemental iron,
    phosphor and calcium,
inhale the animal sweetness of air,
soak up the sunlight,
open a cotyledon eye,
banish all frost
in bacchanalian riot.
It is time! It is time!

Pluto Demoted

A poem protesting the move to strip Pluto of its designation as a planet, and a tribute to Clyde Tombaugh, who discovered Pluto on photographic negatives of star photographs in 1932. There's also a reference to H.P. Lovecraft, who called the as-yet-undetected ninth planet "Yuggoth" in his writings.



No longer a planet, they say!
Pluto, Hades, Yuggoth*, Nine

is now a nothing,
a rock among rocks
despite the tug of its companion,
silent and airless Charon,
the loyal circling
of Nix and Erys.**

Now you are a “mini-world,”
an oversize asteroid
tumbling in dustbelt
so dark and distant
our sun is but a blob
of wavering starlight.

World of death and darkness,
methane, monoxide molting
in every orbiting,
shunned by the sun that made you,
must you now be snubbed by man?

How demote a planet
so lustrous in history?
It has its gods! It has its gods!
Can they evict
  the Lord of the Dead
with just a say-so?
What of the millions of souls
whose home was Hades?
What of beautiful Persephone
who shuttles still
   on a high-speed comet
for her six-month residency
as mistress of the underworld?
What of the heroes and philosophers,
the shades of pagan times
who teem those basalt cities
warming the Plutonian night
with odes and songs and serenades?
Are they to be homeless vagabonds,
slowed from their distant heartbeat
to the stillness of absolute zero?

****
At first, it was “Planet X,”
   out there somewhere
   because Neptune wobbled,
   nodded its rings
   toward Death’s domain.
Then a Kansas farm boy
obsessed with the stars
   ground his own mirrors
   built his own telescope
   with car parts and farm equipment.
Hailstones destroyed the farm crops.
   The telescope survived.
The boy sent drawings of Mars
    and Jupiter
to Lowell Observatory —

Come work for us, they said.
He hopped a train, had just enough
   cash for a one-way fare.

And then, in monk-like hermitage
he toiled at Flagstaff,
comparing sky photographs,
hundreds of thousands of stars,
negative over negative to light,
searching for celestial wanderers,
planetoi, asteroids, comets
that moved when everything else
stood still in the cosmos.

Clyde Tombaugh, twenty-four,
surveyed a sky
where fifteen million lights
the brightness of Pluto twinkled
but only one was Pluto.
He found it.




***

They sought him out
in his retirement,
those fellows
from the Smithsonian,
asked for his home-made instrument
for their permanent collection.
“Hell no,” he said,
“I’m still using it.”

***

I would as soon
forget Kansas as Pluto.
Tell Tombaugh’s ghost
his planet is not a planet!

I can see the old man now,
just off the death-barge
he hopped from Charon,
greeting the Lords of Acheron,
that rusted tube of telescope
under his arm,
scouting a mountaintop
for his next observatory.

Pluto, Hades, Yuggoth, Nine!
Change at your peril
a thing once named!

Yuggoth is the name assigned to the Ninth planet, before its discovery, in the stories of H.P. Lovecraft.
* Nix and Erys are two smaller satellites of Pluto.

Thursday, April 21, 2011

Monday, Miss Schreckengost Reads Us Little Black Sambo

I
We three boys, in the third-grade playground,
one skinny (that’s me), one short, and the fat one,
horn-rimmed glasses all, schoolbooks and lunches
in hand-me-down, important-looking briefcases.
We are the serious scholars, the brainiacs —
we know what the ominous Sputnik is beeping
and even why it’s there and doesn’t fall —
just ask us! We are no good at sports,
try not to be noticed amid the yelling,
the bigger boys’ heave and toss of baseball,
football, basketball, whatever ball
it is the season for. We trade our comics,
Superman, Batman, The Flash, Green Lantern,
and offer furtive glances at the forbidden ones,
brain-rotting horror comics some Congressman
has warned our parents to confiscate and burn.
We’re saving up to buy sulfuric acid;
a long list of chemistry projects depends
on the pharmacist, Mr. Hoffmann, dispenser
of potions, acids, saltpeter and horehound drops.
“Now, boys,” he’d warn us, winking,
“don’t go mixing saltpeter with sulfur,
’cause that plus a little charcoal is gunpowder.
Don’t get yourselves in trouble, okay?”
Oh, no, Mr. Hoffmann, we promise,
we’d never do that, Scouts’ honor.
Not one of us is a Boy Scout.

The sun-drenched playground, dark
in the hulking late-day shadow
of the brick schoolhouse, knows fear:
the monthly air-raid sirens, the file
of all of us quickly-quickly-quickly-now
to the basement shelter, the practice
of “duck and cover” in the event of a flash,
a boom and a mushroom cloud
obliterating Pittsburgh on the horizon.
Russkies and Gerries, Japs and Fascists,
Jack-in-the-box Communists
beneath the bedsprings, enemies everywhere.

Monday, Miss Schreckengost, sometime
between geography and “Our Friend the Atom,”
reads an old book to us — you’ll like this,
she tells us — it’s Little Black Sambo.
It even has pictures.      The tall boy,
the altogether too tall boy in the front row
sinks into his seat.  All eyes are on Ritchie,
the Negro boy, held back a year, two years
from the looks of him, too broad of shoulder
to even consider playing with us.
He sits all day where the teacher can mind him.

The story unfolds. Proud little Sambo,
in his new red coat, his beautiful blue trousers,
is ambushed by tigers who want to eat him.
He bribes one with his jacket, one with
his beautiful trousers, runs home
stark naked to his mother and father,
Black Mumbo and Black Jumbo.

Black Mumbo, who looks like Aunt Jemima,
celebrates the boy’s escape with a pancake dinner.
As the book is held up to show its cover
someone calls out, “Hey, that’s Ritchie!”
Laughs roil the air like veldt heat.

On Tuesday we add Ritchie Barton
to the list of things to be afraid of.
The downhill road to Caruso’s market
becomes a gauntlet run — the price
of a candy bar was meeting Ritchie’s fists.
The older boys, untouchable, catch on,
yell Sambo! Look out for tigers!
from the schoolhouse windows.
Your mama’s name is Black Mumbo!
Your pappy’s name is Black Jumbo!
One day the fifth-grade bullies,
to our slight relief,
are knocked to the ground before us.

Words thunder                                      AIN’T
     punctuate the blows                         NO
     as he pounds Timmy                         TIGERS
     to the pavement                                 IN AFRICA!


Smaller boys run,                                 MY MA’S NAME
     take the long way home                  IS ABIGAIL!
     as he pummels Anthony                  MY PA’S NAME
     against a fencepost                            IS SAMUEL!

Fist-crack, nose-break,
tooth-snap, Ritchie’s
near-baritone shouts
haunt our dreaming.

II
Miss Schreckengost makes seat assignments
for our field-trip to the hydroelectric dam.
“Forty of us,” she counts, “and forty seats.”
A kind of chill comes over the classroom.
“Of course we’ll draw lots for seat-mates.
You will stay with your seat-mate for the whole trip.”

David, the Polish boy, the smallest in class,
is told he will sit next to Ritchie Barton.
At recess, he bursts into tears in the playground.
“I can’t sit next to him. I just can’t do it.”
And I say to Dave, “You’re prejudiced.
You’re only saying that because he’s a Negro.”
That ends the conversation.
The one thing no one wants is to be prejudiced.
That’s worse than being a Nazi or a Communist.
Dave says, his back to all of us,
“I just don’t want to get beat up.”

The day of the trip to Confluence Dam,
the Polish mother keeps her son at home.
Ritchie sprawls across two seats, feet up,
a clenched right fist slapping an open left palm.
We walk a double-line with seat-mates,
Richie alone and trailing far behind,
Miss Shreckengost flamingo-tall ahead of us,
arms pointing at engineering wonders and waterfalls.

I sit in the seat behind Ritchie; Gertrude,
a girl reputed to have head lice,
sits next to me, red pigtails flying.
I have a headache, some dark thing troubling me.
If I’m not prejudiced, I think, then I should sit
in that empty spot beside Ritchie, whose fist and palm
keep time to the road rhythms. All I can see
are noses, teeth, crutches and splints.
I do not want to be beaten, either.

I am not prejudiced.

One day, I would read in Homer:
More hateful to me than all the gates of Hell
is that man who, holding one thing in his heart,
says another, as I would learn the word hypocrite.
Whatever that thing was that I had uttered,
and could not undo, I was ashamed of it.
I vowed never to do it again.

III
Years later, new town, step-fathered,
we take a family road-trip to Washington.
The parks are filled with picnickers,
families in Sunday whites, blankets and baskets,
matrons with parasols, young couples courting.
They are dressed better than we are,
and there is not one white face among them.
Our angry car passes them, windows up,
doors locked, from Washington Monument
to Lincoln Memorial, a cursory nod
to two Presidents, then off we go
to stepfather’s cousin in Maryland.

I remember a handsome, ranch-style home.
I was sent to the living room, turned on
an expensive stereo, where I listened to
the Glazounov Concerto, played by Heifetz.
These must be nice people, I thought.
I went to the kitchen door, listening:

Never seen so many in one place, you say?
They own the city. No decent white folk
will even go there. In a couple weeks
they’re gonna have a Civil Rights March,
a half a million niggers all together,
and that Commie Martin Luther King.
Wish I could get to a rooftop
with this here rifle —

and I know how to use it, too —
wish I could pick him off
and take as many of them with him
as I could, along with those Jew lawyers

I tip-toe back to Russian Glazounov,
          to Jewish Heifetz.


IV
College, and freedom:
“You’ll do it with me?” he said, incredulous.
He thought I was joking. I wasn’t.
Once I had said yes, I had to do it.
I’d done it by then,
with artists, frat boys and athletes,
my notoriety a sure ticket
to never having to ask: they asked me.
But no one black had ever asked me.

His basketball arms and legs,
     impossibly long,
     thrust out of his clothes at impossible angles.
An African prince,
     he could snap me in two easily.

“You know what they say about us?”
he asks, teasingly, shirt sliding off.
     I nod.
“It’s true. You’ll see. No turning back.”
His lithe and supple body presses me,
each second more of him
hot against me. I’m shaking.
He pushes me downward,
my hands on his chest
exploring the statue-lines
smooth as marble.
We end up in bed, I’m gasping
against his spent repose. He lets
me examine the palm of his hand,
yes it is lighter there. One rivulet
of pearl-white fluid remains
upon his dark brown forearm.
He puts my mouth there.

I am afraid to pull away.
It is too quiet. I start to shiver.
I am waiting for the rage-burst,
counting how fast I might make it
to the door and out.

 “I’m not going to hurt you,”
he assures me. “That was good.
We’ll do it again sometime.”
He stays a while. I ask
a torrent of questions,
want to know his feelings,
the truth beneath
the hard and proud exterior.

“You want to know
that no one will rent me a room
in this town? Or about the girl,
the white girl who’ll only see me
under the bridge at midnight?
Or what they’d do to me
if anyone found out?
Or where I’d be
if I didn’t play basketball?”

Just as he’s leaving, I say,
“Oh, what’s your name?
I’m sorry I didn’t ask it.”

“Ritchie,” he says.
“My name is Ritchie.”




Wednesday, April 20, 2011

The Tea Party


New neighbor girls have settled in.
We hear the squeals and screams,
the mother calls and father scoldings
through the open windows.
An angry hedge divides us in back,
though our houses lean together,
shingles and sagging porches
almost blending, identical
weeds abuzz with bumblebees.
The low-slung church
of solemn Mennonites
sits glum and silent
across the street.
The girls' names are Faith and Abby,
my mother tells me,
ten and seven in stiff blue dresses.
Their parents never spoke to us.

Just up the hill, behind a fence,
white-washed and cedar-lined,
Charlene and Marilyn,
   the Jewish girls
live in the great brick house
(anything brick
     is a mansion to us).
I play canasta with Marilyn (my age),
learn to admire her parents,
watch as they light
     the Chanukah candles,
move among them summers
as hundreds congregate
at their swimming pool.
Their mother loves opera,
but not, she says,
not Wagner.

One August day,
an invitation comes,
crayon on tablet paper,
for tea with Faith and Abby.
My mother says be nice and go.

I sit in their yard
with toy furniture.
The doll whose daddy
I'm pretending to be
has one arm missing.

The tea, which is licorice
dissolved in warm water,
is served in tiny cups,
tarnished aluminum,
from a tiny aluminum teapot.
I want to gag
     from the taste of it,
but I sip on and ask for more.

Now Faith addresses me.
"I'll dress the baby
and we shall take her to church."
"Oh, we don't go to church,"
I told my newfound Mrs.

"Never, ever?"
                      "Not even once?"
I shook my head --
I've never set foot inside a church.

"That's just what Daddy told us!"
Abby exclaimed. "You'll go to Hell!"

"You'll go to Hell and be damned!"
they chanted,
"You'll go to hell and be damned!"

"What else does your Daddy say?"
I asked them.  "He says
you'll go to Hell and be damned,
because you're atheists and heathens."

Faith looked fierce,
She poured more tea
and made me take it,
as if it were holy water,
as if I would drink
baptism by stealth.
She raised her cup daintily,
glanced and nodded
at the fence and the cedars.
"Charlene and Marilyn
will go to Hell, too,
right to the bottom
of the flaming pit,
because they're Jews
and murdered Jesus.

Would you like ice cream now?"

At the Wood's Edge: Iroquois Funeral Rite

(A translation into verse of "Okayondoghsera Yondennase:
Oghentonh Karighwateghwenh," from the Iroquois' Ancient Rites of
the Condoling Council: Preliminary Ceremony)

My son, I am surprised to hear your voice
come through the forest to this open place.
You come with troubled mind, through obstacles.
You passed, my son, the grounds where fathers met,
whose hands we all depended on. How then
come you in ease? You tread the paths
our forebears cut, you all but see the smoke
from where they passed their pipes. Can you
be calm when you have wept along the way?

Great thanks, therefore, that you arrive unhurt.
Now let us smoke the clay pipe together.
We know that all around us enemies
each think, “We will not let them meet!”
Here, thorny ways that bar — there, falling trees—
in shadowed glades, the beasts that wait to slay.
Either by these you might have perished,
my son. The sudden floods destroy; dark nights
the vengeful hatchet waits outside the house;
invisible disease is always near.
(Each day our mortal foes are wasting us!)

Great thanks, therefore, that you arrive unhurt.
What great lament if any had died there
along the way, and running words had come,
“Yonder lie bodies, of those who were chiefs!”
We, who come to mourn another, would cry,
“What happened, my son? — Why do you not come?”

In time of peace or peril we do this —
ancestors made the custom, demanding:
Here they must kindle a ritual fire,
here, in the light, at the edge of the woods,
condole with each other in chosen words.

--This poem was published in Sensations Magazine, Spring Summer 2009.

Wednesday, April 13, 2011

The Obsession



But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face.
                                                W. B. Yeats, “When You Are Old”

Of love, I have left the best unspoken.
Hundreds of pages I might have filled,
thousands the images comparing you
to every icon of classical beauty.
Instead I wait for the calm reflection,
beamed back from the pool of the mind.
Night cannot know the sun will follow,
     nor the road, the conquering weed,
     nor the truth of love, the worm inside it.

I have a sole thought
in the sombre purity of detached years —
a gold and lapus scarab
untarnished in the pyramid of time —
it moves my pen, my haunted eye,
defies my age’s forgetfulness,
a swan’s lament suspended, held.

If it be not said, this
perennial song,
which I would say in full but that
you and the sun take it away from me
and one of you comes not back —
if it be not sung at last,
     my soul, it dies with me,
nor I nor the world larger for it,
nor you, moved neither to hear
     nor answer it.

You sat at the perfect center
     of grace and beauty:
around you the songs of divas
cast a protective veil. We hovered,
we, your nightly guests and admirers,
in breathless empathy, like courtiers
around your darkened room, cowed
before a pair of expensive speakers,
a turntable no hands but yours
were allowed to touch,
as Streisand twisted
from comedy to bluesy darkness —
as Piaf chansoned herself to death for love
of the boxer, the convict, the forlorn
and nameless man qui me suive
dans la rue, for the cruel one,
Milord Death who sat at her café table —
Inca Yma soaring four-octaves high
in wind song of Andean lament.
And then suddenly, a dash of Horowitz,
or the shriek-scrape of Edgard Varese,
all this so different from my world
of Beethoven, Mahler, and opera.
Your magic was in making it seem
that every love song had you
as its only object, and that we,
each moth and mite of us,
were doomed to circle you
as that last arc on a long playing record
when the needle leaves the fade out
to final orbit, imprisons us
in heart-thump going-nowhere.

Then came the palpable silence
of no more music, our talk exhausted;
our clumsy withdrawal, as one by one
we are not chosen, each home
to a single bed and a shared despair.
If this had been the Renaissance,
dirks might have been drawn
in the darkened alley outside your door,
or poisons purchased from crones
to eliminate all rivals; love poems hurled
into and through your window casements.

Your tribute comes in dark-shadowed eyes,
mumbled confessions or silent hatred,
the red ribbon of a slit wrist.

I did not play the game, I thought.
I watched the moth-dance as from
an amused distance, and told you so.
“I know you know,” you told me,
“and that is why I respect and fear you.”
I never told you that every sight
of you threw me vertiginous
as though we clung to the near apex
of Mount Everest, as though
to leave you were a slide downward
to the bottom-most dark valley.

It was madness. I knew it was madness.
It has never left me:
I have loved you again and again
     in different faces,
weathered your variable storms,
     the deceitful clouds
     that hid you from me
     and from self-judgment.

I asked too much,
you said — my journey was too long and arduous.
So I stood alone in my passion’s temple,
hymning to gods who could not love themselves.
We could storm the citadels of art together,
I said (visions of a Duncan dance in the Parthenon).
All you said, vaguely, was
I don’t want to be thought of
     as part of a couple.

You thought you had no place in these poems,
the making of word-art a mystery to you,
as the making of your sculptures was to me:
the poem a thing inside too many words
reduced to a few; the sculpted figure
a thing inside a block of stone awaiting
the removal of all that was inessential.
I shuddered each time I touched
    a thing you had made;
perhaps my poems were like fire to you,
a thing too fierce to be endured,
a light you did not wish
to have shined upon you.

I learned from you that I do not write alone:
there is always one reader, and one written of.
That my soul, ensnared in the web of yours
takes without cost and enlarges thereby.
In the moment I confessed to myself
I loved you, I saw in full light
what Beatrice was to Dante, Lara to Zhivago,
the loved boy to Hafiz the madman.

Full many nights we courted, flirted,
     word-circled one another.
One night our talk outlasted
     the guttering candle.
That night, you came to my bed —
    O summer night of which I cannot speak —
almost to curse me by a single giving
you never intended to give again,
as though one touch would cure me
     of my madness.

Years I dreamt of you,
     knowing only the where and how of you,
     not writing, not calling.
I refined, from shattered bits of you,
     the man you might have become
     the words you might have spoken
     the art that might have poured from your hands
         in answer to my words’ urgings.
You had no inkling what children we birthed!
Here in my wordy palace your regency’s intact—
     back on drear earth,
discarded lovers conspired against you,
moths in your aurora,
graying the New England autumn
or bleaching to graveyard white
the coral reef beyond your final place of hiding.

Did you fear me to the end? My harmless love-lie
trapped you only in the realm of angels
where immaterial ghosts of me
came to call, masked, and offered dangerous prizes.
Or perhaps you didn’t think of me at all,
the dark fete poem of my yearning filed away
with diplomas and yearbooks and bric-a-brac.

I waited for seven years, then seven more.
We met, collided, repelled like angry magnets.
Once in a great while I received
     a polite letter;
once in a great while I sent
imprudent poems, my pride and solace.
I said, You are in here somewhere, in some
of these poems
. I did not say, You are in them all.

I have, somewhere in a drawer of sad things
two presents you gave me: a beaded Indian
sunwheel, like a captive star,
and a necklace you fashioned
     from a pyrite shard, fool’s gold
I refuse to submit to metaphor,
just as I refuse to wear it.

Now they have told me of your death,
which culminates the silence between us.
On my autumnal journey homeward,
I come to the place of our meeting,
back to the silent, pebbled lakeshore.
I wait beneath a gibbous moon,
chilled as the damp fog enfolds me.
I have no promise of ghosts, or of Heaven,
no cause to hope that some thread, tenuous
as thought in the ether, might draw
you here, touch to my touch, companioning.
So much unfinished business between us,
too few the decades of life in which to do it.
All the wrong people keep dying, I tell myself.

I touch the limestone with its fossil memories.
I taste the water, breathe in
the hovering mist, the bat and maple aura
of the pioneer graveyard. Some blossom,
complex and curled upon itself
like a tropical orchid,
drifts silently toward me in the black water.

Know this as the place of my waiting,
a waiting that will outlive me,
repeated as some other stands here
and reads aloud these words, the vow
I made some thirty years ago:

Know I will wait,
          that I am bound,
               that no other has ever been awaited
                    or will be.