Independence Day: A Cemetery in Cincinnati 


Someone keeps this place immaculate,
a garden of the departed stretching for acres
Monuments to wealth and the pride of a name 
mortar the sky and fascinate the eye 
Below, flush to the earth 
hands already gone to grass 
labored over these ancient, modest commemoratives,
brief stone glosses to the deadly particulars of an old division,
its ghost still not laid to rest
but restless in the wake of each new atrocity,
burning churches, waving irreconciliation's banner 

i’ non averei creduto/ che morte tanta n’avesse disfatta 
Dante's pilgrim exclaimed, visiting his own immortal underground 
'I would not have believed that death had undone so many'
once happy souls who smiled in the morning of their fight's 
brief day and never saw its noon 
What remains of their story gathered here and put to ground 
beneath the smooth black bore of a twelve-pounder, 
stamped with a name and laid amid a parade of mortal peers
by sad disciples of a valiant cause, who carved these stunted stories 
on the stony squares that lie at our feet, 
a square foot each of tarnished stone, barely space enough 
for name and final affiliation --
Illinois infantry, Indiana infantry, Ohio regiment,
Kentucky private, Pittsburg battery --
no room to tell us where they fell, and when, and for what greater good, 
no wider way to preserve a final truth in their heart of hearts, 
who loved them, mourned them, 
who would die a hundred deaths 
to know how dearly they mattered 
to those who mattered to them 

No country deserves them, no underground, however bare or vaunted, 
can cancel their account
flowers of our mortality, 
picked before their time

Let those who rule this land 
walk these acres on hands and knees, 
inscribing each name on their fortune-favored hearts, 
this holiday that celebrates its bloody birth,
salutes the vision, begs the cost

LATE SONGS: A SEQUENCE


i. Searching for Home
(after a song by Paul Cardall)

The solitude in the music 
calls to me 
Nothing explains why I listen
why I drop all thought of deeds to do
to pick up that old cross, drop the plane and the square 
and follow 
The great works unread, 
the letters unwritten
friends unforgotten
the broken tool unmended 
Do I even know who, or what,
I follow 
Angel of my incompletion,
blindness of my inner sight
uncertain whether you lift your massive arm
and snort into the frieze 
of a spiral galaxy



ii. Rhade Govinda
(after a song by Deva Premal)

The horn of an elephant 
or some ancient beast incomprehensible
eons at your fingertips 
tales of the succulent beginnings of 
mountain crevices 
inverted into oceans
pouring out mold and phagocyte
Flute of generations
subtle mouldings, shells, descending caverns
and here we are
Walking all over Krishna's creation
as if we know where we are



iii. Swimming in a Sea of You
(After a song by Michael Whalen)

High notes, gentle breaths 
breezes of divinity 
the yin and yang of peace and yearning
two souls
chant, chant, chant... (the name of your god or goddess goes here)
We know you're out there 
and that you are only us 
turned inside out
the god in me 
salutes the god in you

(As William Blake put it, 
the human form divine)




Snake Crossing 


We met the snake in the woods
But couldn't make head nor tails of it
Its body spoke of worlds incomprehensible
A rustle in the grass where no grass grew,
only the groan of the waking earth 
We picked our way through the path of the pines
a place avoided by deer, favored by walkers 
who park by a skating rink, twelve minutes from family skate,
then home for Sunday tea
soon we would hear the familiar, distant roar 
of our own herd, traffic 
from the place where the preservation of the hills 
gives way to the shopping mall

Too civilized for the mall,
too comfortable for snakes 
we come for the plangent ecstasy 
of birds we cannot see
skunk cabbage the only new green on the forest floor,
then catharsis, the turn in the path wriggling underfoot 
A two-headed snake: paralysis of disbelief
Our words swallowed, we jabber syllables of confusion
Sylvan silence mocked our twisted tongues
Till the creature lashed from side to side 
in an ecstasy of ingestion, 
and we understood: a meal of the second self 
the black snake taking into his vacant maw 
the green-skinned reptile, that slightly slimmer serpent
A fearsome copulation: I could eat you up 
O hostile takeover!
Or maybe some bestial mind merge
that tickling of the back brain 
when you crawl from a wintry retreat 
to laze about in the year's first sun

Our Sunday gloomed by recognition,
nature eating itself, clash of cutlery at our feet
we quit the scene, no ground remaining for the simple pleasure 
of the greenwood, 
this spare and hunted afternoon 
We fled like earth's first parents
from the garden's fall 
I am my own reptile, as Satan said,
or words to that effect





Hungry Summer 


I feel about the birds on the cherry tree
tearing off its blinding white blossoms
As I do about the easy spring days
of early May when earth simmers up 
the year's first soothing seventies
Now that spring has finally put a bare foot down
I fear the beast of summer, the swish of its heavy legs
And those large happy jaws chewing through 
days of children by the shore
their voices the eerie cries of disappearing angels