What if Lethe

                         
came first, undoing preceded doing, nothing not
empty, its song unhearable, though it's there, because
nothing is not unbusy—the slack in a smile, the silence
that whistles day and night in the ear, the twitter of wrens
where their house sways in the pine that will split in half
next winter, their eggs with nowhere to go in spring,
which is what came first, nowhere to go, no twigs to make
a nest, no height to be safe on, until you look down,
where you didn't know you were above anything at all,
where nothing gapes, shadowy lips a circumference you
not only see but speak through, because all feeling is
transparent, your words the empty space the breath blows
through, and here, right here, an awareness of scented
light, a pool of events that will happen where nothing
can be explained.

(First published in The Yale Review)


Annus Mirabilis


There is the year of the first appearance
of the potato peeler; the year Philip Larkin
finally got laid.  It doesn’t have to begin
with Vesalius’s illustrations of flayed bodies,
books covered with the skin of executed convicts,
a fine brown leather.  Copernicus whizzing
the earth around the sun; a great mathematician
fleeing the plague in Cambridge, sitting
under that tree where an apple dropped
into his brain and he tasted inevitability; 
Einstein shooing light from his study
in discrete quanta, or is it waves,
his daughter Lieserl dead from scarlet
fever or given to the friend Helene
(what is the certainty of two daughters,
the dead one, the living one, being raised
or buried  in Serbia,  both together in the
closed box of his mind until someone looks?)
while at the same time there’s motion, the
speed of light, the position of the reader
looking at this (simultaneity a way of rubbing
hands together) (magnetic fields like lovers
toppling), Brownian movements the restless
urgency of just about everything; the year
of flat prostates and muscular vocal cords,
when the elderly come bursting out of Tosca.
Or come out of newly invented hot tubs
and rub themselves dry, remembering how
they once were like the baby Isaac Newton,
small enough to fit into a one-quart jug.

(First published in Connotations)
 


My 100th Year


The front yard festooned with bittersweet vines
that choked out so many young maples that
I just wanted to spit.  But their orange
berries hang here to celebrate stubborn
life, leaky heart, the bad taste that birds know
to beak aside as so much counterfeit
nourishment.  Because birds do think.  And last
night’s woodchuck did take out the last of the
butternut squash thanks to the wire fence
I hung, that he dug under, shaking his
head why I never learn things belong to
each of us according to beak or tooth
or claw, maybe handed down, like acreage,
an office building, oil stocks and bearer
bonds, a priceless Rembrandt. What’s the
secret of long life? I think of the cigarette
Uncle Joe smoked forbidden on the porch,
Robert Mitchum’s wheezing emphysema,
the crackling lullaby of promises
like a mother’s kiss we wake to, the gap-
toothed old men in the Caucasus.  Look at
my granddaughters playing now with their own
daughters the age their mothers were when I
began this poem, the orange berries sway-
ing over their heads, the breath I try to
conserve in the wind coming off the sea.

(First published in The Village Voice)