Robert

I learned that
Robert
Was not to depend on
For company at Christmas,
Or raising children or
Planting gardens.

He was to share coffee at dawn
In a strange house
In someone else’s neighborhood;
To jog though the park
In the haze of November
And laugh at a fat lady
On a moped, more because
We had been lovers than
Because she was fat or the
Moped tiny, or gravity unfair.

That is not to say
I did not love him then,
But that I needed to
Fill the empty rooms
I felt forming in my future,
Rooms that could not stay empty
Without spreading into the endless,
Dustless, white desert of a dream
That will not come together
At the end of a night.

The shimmering mist of laughter
Two lovers share beneath the trees
In November will not easily trade
For a family, fat, dull and certain,
And oddly favored by gravity.

Digging A New Flowerbed at the Nursing Home

I stopped to watch
An old shoe surface,
Curled and sickly yellow;
A three pronged fork
And rusty companions;
Bleached and crusted pillbugs;
Two writhing half-worms;
Grave implications of flowers.

January 2

You should have come.
It was cold.
I traced cracks in the cement
Across an empty parking lot.
Arms out, I teetered
Along a curb and down an alley
Where the cracks were full of tar.
I popped tar bubbles there with Debbie
(We popped them with our feet)
In July when we were seven.
I watched a leaf float down the gutter.
In the water I saw clouds;
Trees spidering along the fence;
A blackbird on a post,
Twitching his tail;
My face.
I leaned closer—the blackbird was gone.
I was alone awhile with the clouds
And the trees.
I squashed a puff ball with my heel.
I rolled a Bois d’Arc apple
Through the mud, and threw
A can at old Mrs. Bottigheimer’s dog.
(It hit the fence)
In the water I saw clouds;
Trees spidering along the fence;
A blackbird, on the post again behind me,
Twitching his tail.

You Are a Void Now

You are a void now,
An empty space that cannot be filled,
And I am a lost boy.

We Are Best Alone

We are best alone. We talk to ourselves.
We comfort ourselves.
We don’t judge; we rest.

We kiss the dog on the snout,
We love who we really love,
We hold God in our hands.

Diagnosis

Poetry
A useless religion;
Egghead bread
For spectacled librarians
On lunchbreaks
And coffeebreaks
In January of
Very bad years;
Unprofitable
Non-nutrative
Habit forming
Sweetner
Causing Cancer
In laboratory animals
And possible brain cell
Deterioration
Leading to everyday
Shortness of breath,
Watering of eyes,
Hollowness,
Of heart,
And loss of hearing;
Acuteness of
Life
Under extreme conditions
Bad breath.

Doorway to Springtime

All was color:
Grape hyacinth,
Yellow daffodils,
Row upon row
Of flaming azalea,
Pink and purple
Crocus on a
Background of
Scalding roses,
Twining rung
Upon rung
Of brilliant lattice.
Then through no
Fault of my own,
The door slammed shut
And the sun went out.

Suicide

Those who come to us
And leave too soon
Were never meant to stay.
Do not judge them for your loss
Thank God for sharing.

They are often angels
With wings too delicate
A rainbow that fades too quickly.
They are a gift.

They may seem as
Darkness and struggle,
A tragedy, a sin.
But it is not so.
They are a looking glass
Reflecting the richness and dark beauty of your world,
In transparency and light.

Someday you will thank God for sharing,
You will accept this strange gift,
And bless the pain you both endured,
For you to have it,
For even so short a time.

Love After Death

To carry someone in your heart
That you can neither have nor use
Touch nor hold nor even claim.
To have desire and put it down,
To have wants and go without,
To keep your own counsel,
To respect unnatural limits,
To feel lost a million times over,
To value loving more than being loved,
Is an amazing, unexpected gift—
It leaves me humble and breathless.

Belated

She loved you as a child and so comes
As a child in the late evening,
To rest her hand upon the earth.

You taught her to believe
In what she could not see
And so she believes she feels your warmth
There, and cries tears she could not
Cry for you while you were living.

Having nothing to say, she rests in the long
Grass beside your stone, discovered—
Chance meeting of friends, one odd
Conversation—in a supermarket,
Years later.

She rests until the child
Is quiet, as her love is now quiet,
In the green field where she leaves
You sleeping.

Gently

I am the same
Today the old man
Breaking out pecans;
The old woman shelling
Peas into a hat,
Pod and pod and pod,
With drawn fingers
Until the hat is full,
Boiling with bacon, with salt,
The sun passing end to end
Of the long fence and away,
No one to come.

Today, a sleeper dreaming
Pod and pod and pod
Old man breaking out doves
Old woman shelling gems
Into the sun.