THE APPARITION

I hadn’t thought of him for many years.
He lived, as modest as a man can be,
so far away no news had reached my ears –
and now lies in a grave I’ll never see.

Yet there he stood before me, looking just
the way he did when youth and hope were green,
reanimated out of memory’s dust
as suddenly his name flashed on my screen.

And then he dimmed, and took his rightful place
with all those other elements in this
long journey, whose persistence as a trace
balances on the edge of an abyss.

Am I the one to purge him from the list
that represents his last claim to exist?

THE PERSISTENCE OF MEMORY

Some years ago she kept a small hotel
and hosted guests and lovers with delight.
A traveling man among her clientele
who’d seen the world came back to town one night

and wooed and won her. So they locked the door.
She closed the business then and, now at ease,
they took a great room on the second floor
that looked out past the gardens to the trees.

She didn’t miss those old unbridled days
when she had welcomed each arriving guest,
and he had no nostalgia for the haze
of smoky bars and yearnings half expressed.

They should have reveled in their modest stake,
relieved that life was sweet, the future fair;
but sometimes in the night he’d bolt awake
thinking he heard a footstep on the stair.

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THE DEAD

I walk daily among the dead.
Unlike the fragmentary living
who often fail me in my need
the dead are solid and complete.

They ask nothing but give much.
What faults they had are minor now.
Even their old betrayals rest
on something tried, aspired to.

In their teeming cities they
go on doing what they do best.
Rooted, unmoved, they speak their dead
language at large. They signify.

Daily, though dumb and motionless,
they move the mind. I strain to hear
my father, mother, dear lost friend
answer outside of joy or grief

questions I did not know to ask.
“This is personal,” they say.
“It’s vital that you understand. . . .”
The words are faint and far away.

THE GNOMON

So wide our comfort, and so long,
we grew accustomed to warm days
and the compliance of the clock.
I heard her cough again. She said
it hurt this time.

And just at dusk a spiderweb
strung between mysterious points,
symmetric radiating lines
swaying in the light breeze,
broke when I passed too close and fine
strands tore apart.

Don’t count on any
beauty that lies so near the heart.

HER JOURNAL

Artists at eleven.
Carpenters creating a credenza.
Careful confidences on the phone.
Dissipation at dusk.

He said my surfaces need smoothing.
God knows he isn’t perfect but
he’s more than nothing.

                     . . .

A break between two conference calls.
She texted him again.
I can’t remember where he met her.
An edgy voice in me rebels:
You can do better.

                     . . .

Vail was a lark. Back to New York in time
for Peter’s opening. Joel takes
these challenges with such aplomb
(Peter is doing very well),
and if he’s jealous, what the hell!

                     . . .

To be completely honest, I haven’t been
completely honest. Sooner or later
there’ll have to be a reckoning.
But does it really matter?
This guilt is sickening.
Let it be later.

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ADVICE TO THOSE IN TRANSIT
                 (the fine print)

Passengers on a journey
involving an ultimate destination
or a stop in a country not their own,
whether a fortuitous termination,
planned or adventitious,
scheduled or resulting from malicious
actions of persons known or unknown,

are advised that international accords,
treaties, prior remedial awards,
pacts, understandings, appendices
previously issued, whether or not redacted,
or statutes yet to be enacted
by duly authorized authorities
within or without the sphere
of influence or the clear
purview of the originating country
or any nation claiming sovereignty
in which persons undertaking this trip
might or might not hold citizenship

may apply to the entire journey
subject to claim by state’s attorney
or any portion however defined
to which the traveler may be consigned
and may limit carrier’s liability
in respect to destruction of property,
personal injury, or non-viability,
hereinafter referred to as death,
to all of which outcomes nevertheless
passengers have a legitimate claim,
it being understood that the same
shall be exercised upon arrival
at the ultimate destination where survival
is mythic, as set forth above
in accordance with the universally accepted non-specific
temporal status thereof.

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SEARCH FOR A PIEBALD BIRD

She knows the way back, she is sure.
Her rule is trust your instinct. But
both time and space can bend. Before
she knows, the way is out of sight
and she is lost. The blended paths
are only shades of hope.

She sees now that the obvious way
can only lead to darkness and
a new unsettling vacancy.
Something is missing in her mind.
Lines veer and waver but no paths
cohere to make a map.

She cannot leave the way she came.
She doesn’t know where she has been.
A stone she picked up far from home
becomes her only talisman.
She does not trust the homeward path
or recognize its shape.

Someone will find her. She’ll be led
back to her old familiar grounds
and memories half-tenanted.
She does not grasp all she pretends.
But still amid the maze of paths
she plans a new escape.

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THE NEIGHBORHOOD IN SPRING

Two days of rain, but now there’s sun.
Children are racing through the park
along the asphalt pathways where
puddles have formed and sparrows bathe.
Two women talk outside a store
while down the street a man in dark
glasses shouts into his phone.

Seen through the ginkgo trees in bud,
three storefront mannequins engaged
in pantomime lack clothes. Behind
the trashcans odd graffiti writhe.
Papers dance in a fitful wind.
Here where the brick is pocked and gouged
a sidewalk slab is stained with blood.

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CHARCOAL GHOSTS
          The artist returns to the
          classroom of his youth.

Skeleton in the corner,
odor of paint and clay,
unruly molded figures,
black crayons on a tray;

a staggered row of easels,
each with a mirror stopped
against a slanted backboard
on which a sketch pad’s propped,

and on each pad a likeness
just starting to emerge:
daring, discovery, error
quivering on the verge.

Out of the carbon haze,
a shocked and naked stare
of eyes not well aligned
but riveted on air,

as if developer washing
emulsion had begun
to reveal strange cabalistic
traceries of the sun.

Into the room they’ve stumbled,
half-formed and half-defined,
fleeing inchoate passion,
awakening into mind,

leaving as testament this
shadow investiture,
fixed in a frame when youth
hesitates, not yet sure.

Alumnus in this room,
take stock of what you lost
when your audacious bloom
gave up its charcoal ghost.

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ELIZABETH BISHOP ATTENDS A CONCERT

THE DEER TRAIL

From my small cottage, deep
in woods so dense that light
is lost, I hacked out, step

by step, a pathway straight
into uncertainty.
It took me years. I thought

by force I’d blaze a way
to rove and come back home
and in the effort I

might master at least some
mysteries of the place.
I had no certain aim.

Truly my urge was less
and more: I had a need.
Some woodsmen who lived close

to my expanse of sod,
having keen tools and skill,
aided me when they could.

But I had planned it all.
I sought no partners. Much
strength is required to fell

a giant dying birch,
all to extend a path
that then will only reach

ten feet through undergrowth
beyond the previous mark.
And when you shear a swath

of brush where branches fork,
they tangle, stab, and scrape
you everywhere. The work

exhausts. You can’t give up
or lose sight of your planned
direction. Saws can rip

into your flesh. The honed
ax gleams with danger. More
than once I felt the wind
of death stir in my hair.
Along the way I spied
traces of tawny fur

caught on a thorn, and blood
dotting the fallen leaves.
But now and then I strayed

from the defile that moves
through granite walls and towers
of oak, to where sun paves

the rock, and sky acquires
an unaccustomed glow
refracted through the layers

of mist and cloud that lie
over the forest with
the waning of the day,

and my quixotic path
became a trickster’s maze.
Years of such labor both

tired me and gave some ease
when, deep in the woods, I came
upon a new trail. Was

this a device of some
intruding neighbor who,
confused or on a whim,

had thrust his own way through
protected land? A glance
corrected me. I saw

abundant evidence
of deer. Scat on the ground
and dirt with clear hoof-prints

had marked the spoor. Beyond
my path it traced a ridge
that led down to a pond

with cress along its edge
and mushrooms clustering
among the foliage.

Rising from there along
a sheer escarpment where
small curling ferns had sprung

up among pine and fir,
the deer trail opened out
on a vast reservoir

of dappled moss, sunlit
and undulant, all green
and yielding underfoot.

I stood there, quite alone
and yet surrounded by
fantastic spirits, kin

of my pathless ecstasy.
Silence enveloped all
the woods. The far-away

sounds of motors grew still
and I, godless and awed,
humbled, stumbled and fell.

There on the moss-deep bed
stretching through pine and oak
under sky without cloud,

I relearned how to walk
and, facing steep rock and thorn,
turned and made my way back.

           *  *  *
Whatever a man might learn
from so much solitude
runs like a strand of yarn

along the path I made
through wilderness to reach,
finally, the village road.

But I have been too much
in my own company.
Those who could only watch

my slow advance now stray
onto the trodden trail
or venture out with me,
sometimes with chains to pull
trees from the path, sometimes
only to watch until

light in the forest dims
and sky turns violet.
Slowly the way becomes

familiar as regret,
and we retrace our steps,
struck inarticulate.

Then, after a moment’s lapse,
with jovial wit one says,
“You realized your hopes –

you have achieved a blaze
of glory!” And I recall
how once, for no clear cause,

I grew weak-kneed and fell
on the thick moss. Though I
have traced their fleeting trail

through mysteries, I see
that even here there are
a thousand ways I may

pursue the elusive deer
as they retreat beyond
our human register,

yet doubt that I shall find
all I have left behind.

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