World in a Pond

World in a Pond

Trying to do more right than wrong,

climbing the livelong day,

                        at times the most                        

surprising allies arrive to stand beside you.

Raw volunteers shaking sleep from their eyes,

ready to lend queer shoulders to the wheel.

Today, that magical rock crevice we called

                                    The Pond

when it filled after several days’ rain

and morning found a frog, or two of them,

calling it home. Plopping and diving                     

and floating up goggle-eyed to check us out.

We brought them minnow companions, scooped    

with a little dipper net from the bay, snails

and crayfish, sunk in clumps of cosy moss and

grass weighted with stones so bright-veined

                        under the clear water.                       

World in a pond all our wonder and attention,

                                    absorbing us so

utterly we’d no regret when another day’s passion

snatched us away, too suddenly to watch 

Pond’s slow diminishment or wonder how its

citizens always found their way back to the 

                                                river.

Recess

 

Recess

When a longtime bully steps away,

dank vile slab that’s been leaning hard—

you come to yourself in a sliver of air,                 

and blink, and breathe, and quietly say:

Those bricks, just bricks. Those faces, faces.

Not a toppling wall, not a jeering mob.

You tingle to brink in a skin of allow,

mineral light in your thankful chest.                  

Peace returned is the joy that throbs.

World’s your home as it always was.

The Notes

The Notes

The hardest test they leave until the end.

But there is no age in these notes of Bach

making their way through two floors to the basement,

unless it be in the feeling way they waver

and pause, testing the extent of silence,

stepping respectfully over blankness

like a walker crossing the first autumn

ice or the ice of a suspected spring.

All of the player’s seventy-nine years,

her husband’s death at ninety-nine and her flight

across continents “to be with others”—

it is all in her submission to and

acceptance of these gaps, the embrace

the old give, since they must, to stopped places.

Otherwise her playing might be taken

for her granddaughter’s, lately practising

the same invention, except the latter’s halts,

being external to her intent, are surly,

faltering forming no part yet of what she knows,

and she rushes to repair them as she should,

leaping the rest no composer asked for

to catch the dropped melody, learning to read.

Bier

Bier

Bucket-plumbed drafty old shack

close by the river, alcoholic,

beating his wife’s teeth out, she

got mistaken for his mother;

could cook shore dinner for eight

easily, pickerel and spuds sputtering,

coffee boiling, beans bubbling, hands

passing deftly in and out of the flames.

His death the artless violence of his

life, a daftly gentle dismantling,

drunk insensate in a cedar boat

adrift on moonlight’s current, unfelt

quickening, then gulp down Recollet Falls.