Facing the void without backing down
After the Stroke
If he could, he’d say:
From light to light
the night-bound day’s
impassioned traffic beats
a strung-out simile
of surf’s reproof to sailor’s joy
at landfall.
What he said was:
“Not. Home. Yet.”
*
If he could see how late
snow and early blossoms war
to whiten trees that took the hint
of lengthened days, he’d say:
What’s felt as two —
the clenching and unclenching
of the year’s fist — is one.
What he said was: “One.”
*
He was bones and string
who made that air move.
How it came, a loosening or
a gathering, was left unsaid.
To mourn him is to feel
his words at your throat.
The Cardiologist Reads His Own EKG
Condor-eyed, he likens the spikes
to the peaks of his boyhood
in the San Rafael Mountains
where skiers left their scars
Constrained by strict calligraphy
he seeks an artifact,
an out that lets the germ
of vacillation in
And finds instead
the quickened certainty
of prey: This is no time
for the half hearted.
Field Report
(for E. O. Wilson)
He was small of stature, hardly taller than a child’s antennae.
His clothes, if those scraps of indeterminate color were meant
to keep his thorax warm or hidden, are mostly rotted away.
In his stone box he stared up at what might have been a rude
facsimile of night pricked with a hundred starry wounds.
He surely died of the blow that split his head. But was it to let
something out or in? We know he nested nearby. The flinty pits
under what’s left of his abdomen are kin to the berries that stain
the looming hills. Were they his last meal? Who laid him here
too late to hallow whatever hope he clung to? I say “he” because
the hard parts say so in the only language that doesn’t lie.
Down he went into the ground for five thousand of our years.
We cannot know how time felt to him or what spoor he traveled.
But from the clothes, if that’s what they were, we must believe
he feared the cold as we do, or the shame of nakedness, or both.
Does that make us, despite his four limbs, kin? If not, what could?
Lament for William Dunbar
(1460-1520 – Known today for his poem, “Lament for the Makers” with its Latin refrain “Timor mortis conturbat me,” which can be translated as “Fear of death distresses me”)
When shadows crowded out the light
and courtly pleasures fled the night
(“Timor mortis conturbat me”)
he sought relief in naming names
of friends and rivals, peers in fame
(“Timor mortis conturbat me”)
a litany of Scotland’s best
whom fate or time had laid to rest
(“Timor mortis conturbat me”)
and found in lamentation hope,
an easing of the gallows’ rope.
(“Timor mortis conturbat me”)
Then irony spread wide its teeth
and showed the other face of grief:
Emboldened by the poet’s breath
his cry outlived the lie of death.
Timor mortis conturbat me
