October 2011
5 posts
September 2011
7 posts
A Child's Wedding Song
Thumb and finger make a ring to see the future through. I can see the world through it only the world and you, only the world and you alone. If I should break this ring, where will I find you in the world though I find everything?
—Glyn Maxwell
Magnificat
O Lord, I did walk upon the earth and my footprints did keep pace with the rain and I did note, I did note where orange birds flew up from the puddles thou hast made and where the toads leapt from your trenches, but nowhere was there that I could go for I could not rise from the firmament upon which I was placed, and nowhere could I so I kept until I could no more straight then bent said...
Reluctance
Out through the fields and the woods And over the walls I have wended; I have climbed the hills of view And looked at the world and descended; I have come by the highway home, And lo, it is ended. The leaves are all dead on the ground, Save those that the oak is keeping To ravel them one by one And let them go scraping and creeping Out over the crusted snow, When others are sleeping. ...
The Merger
for my son Trying to think of something useful To say about marriage, I remember A morning when I was twenty-plus, Self-absorbed in my tinny pink Renault Dauphine, my Little Toot, And I tried to get by a tank-truck on A bendy road too briefly straight. Shuddering, pedal floored, my frivolous Vessel leveled with the cab Like a pilot fish by a shark’s grim grille. Then there was a...
The Word
Down near the bottom of the crossed-out list of things you have to do today, between “green thread” and “broccoli,” you find that you have penciled “sunlight.” Resting on the page, the word is beautiful. It touches you as if you had a friend and sunlight were a present he had sent from someplace distant as this morning—to cheer you up, and to remind...
Green Pear Tree in September
On a hill overlooking the Rock River my father’s pear tree shimmers, in perfect peace, covered with hundreds of ripe pears with pert tops, plump bottoms, and long curved leaves. Until the green-haloed tree rose up and sang hello, I had forgotten… He planted it twelve years ago, when he was seventy-three, so that in September he could stroll down with the sound of the...