​Note: These three poems cover much of the territory—literal and figurative—that I’m drawn to in my writing. The first, set near my home overlooking the Tanana River in central Alaska, meditates on a lost friend, the poet Jon Anderson; the second takes on issues of family in the intimate vein inspired by my teacher Robert Lowell; and the third looks at a highly problematic work of art that raises questions made current by the resurgence of anti-Semitism in our time.

​

THE UNSEEN BOAT
                        When I was lonely, I thought of death.
                        When I thought of death, I was lonely.
                                                --Jon Anderson (1940-2007)

The island that guarded the slough
is gone, as floodwaters swirl and clench.
Benched on a log, I listen to an unseen boat
 
and watch a four-prop struggle into sky.
As it skims the tree-line spruce across the way
I recall your outstretched arms, your

fingers crooked like knives thrusting
inward toward the heart. Two flights up
we pillowed on the dusty floor, your bed,

and joked that our three R’s were Rilke,
Roethke and Rimbaud. “Brains won’t solve
everything,” you said, “you have to let

some mystery come through.” As the boat
grows loud, then louder, sputters into view,
I feel the earth beneath me stutter, big trees

undercut by water. Fleet clouds roiling
overhead. The power of water is the power
of change. “Say the harshest thing,” you said,

“but don’t stop there. A quiet steady voice
may be most enduring.” Playful and morose,
vibrant, insomniac, somehow you’d cracked

the art of poetry but never found a knack for life.
The slough I’ve skated on and skied, the island
where the beavers lodged have washed away.

A Native couple on their way to town--
the small red outboard holds their valuables
protected under tarps. The boat putts by

near shore, then stalls. Tilting the motor back,
he chokes it, pulls the rope. “The secret
of poetry is cruelty,” you wrote. The shifty
rusted outboard comes to life again.  
 

 

 

THE FATHER’S SINS                                             
OF WHICH WE MUST NOT SPEAK

                                              “Is there a way to be a good son and not
                                              run afoul of reason?”—Leon Wieseltier, KADDISH

I straighten the hose, pulling one end
downhill and the water comes
in a gush, like the last beat of summer.

I tilt the greenhouse pail, spilling
rust on the rust-red ground. Tomato plants
gone yellow, sag in the chilly air.
 
The marigolds near the house, half brown,
half gold, hang on. Flower boxes
down the drive—completely gone.
 
But what’s this all about? Two years ago
today we laid my father out. While relatives
stood round speaking in pious tones,

men plugged him in the ground.
I felt my bones grow brittle.
Must I still correct my father’s life

whose Burberrys’ raincoat cools in the back
of the closet worn just once by me?
Though I sport his hand-me-down socks,
 
a blend of nylon and wool,
good for the arctic fall,
I want to say, there’s nothing of
 
my father left in me. But sometimes
his voice behind my back turns me around
and the talk we never had resumes

exciting my complaints—that nothing
he ever said revealed the deeper self.
“I’ve never known a man that smart with less
 
self-knowledge,” Mother told me once.
But she stuck by him through his disgrace,
when the flaws that underlay his charm

were plain. He claimed he’d meant no harm
touching my young wife’s breast
or pushing through the door,

knocking his other daughter-in-law—Christ,  
how could he!—to the floor
and forcing himself on her—a crime

he never fully faced or answered for.
I rake this ground and pile up the leaves.
The season aches like an old man’s knee.

Later, in the hospital he sat up straight,
gave a fearful groan, eyes bulging out,
and then fell back. They opened his chest

and worked—code blue—an hour before 
my grieving mother had enough,
and that was that. Whatever there is

of grace I wished it mingled with his dust
when they set his coffin in its place
among the moldering kin, as the rabbi said we must.
                                               
This poem originally appeared in Ice Flow.

​
​A RENAISSANCE ALTARPIECE

 
Uccello painted them: a family bound
together to a tree-trunk post, staring
with horror down as flames leap up from
foot to calf to knee. Four horsemen on
the right display the flag of Rome. Across
from them, with faces glistening in the flame-
light, stand the helmeted guards who
trussed this family up and set them blazing.

Two boys, both red-heads, share their parents’
fate, while in the background—fields, a leafy
apple tree, farm houses, and a church.
The sky behind a neighbor castle town
is black. The merchant and his pregnant wife
and boys were damned for what they did to
desecrate the host. “Religion,” I once
told a Catholic friend, “makes good people better, 
 
bad people worse.” Another panel illustrates
their crime. They cooked it in a pan until
it bled. The blood of Christ spilled out and ran
across the floor, and when it dribbled
underneath the door, they were exposed.
Have you ever fallen from the second
story window of a dream—the broken
glass, the silent floating scream? You’d think

at least the child in her womb could be
redeemed. Why would a Jewish merchant
be so hostile to the host? Why in
Urbino was this credited? What calculus
of feeling can elucidate this art, unless
it charts a program to annihilate
a race. Aghast, the baffled victims
stare at lizard flames that leap and leap.
​
From my collection Archives of the Air published by Salmon Poetry