NOTE:  I have been friends with Sam Norman for many years.  We taught together for years, became friends, and then our families became friends.  It has been a lovely journey with Sam and Teri, with lots of highlights.  Among my favorite times spent with the Norman family were Benjamin and Daniel’s Bar Mitzvahs, and Rebecca’s Bat Mitzvah.  I love his children very much indeed.  These two poems, a garland and a ghazal are my feeble, hugely inadequate attempt to pay homage to the family.  Peace and blessings, Sam and family.  Rest, Ben.  I love you.

 
The Fallen Leaves - I
                        The world is a shattered pane of stained glass...
                                                                 -Stained Glass
                                                                                                               Sam Norman
                                              …the nodding
                                                               campanula of bell buoys;
                                                               the ticking, linear
                                                               filigree of bird voices.
                                                              -Fog
                                                                                                             Amy Clampitt
 
Others remain after the fallen leaves,
and then it’s all fog, everything is fog,
and, of course, the idea that you are safe
is more unreal than that thing you cannot
grasp no matter how many decades pass.
 
*

Would it help to capture fog in a net,
harnessed camanchaca, the creeping fog
that Chilean fog-catchers trap and drink.
Would that help?  That half science, half magic?
Or is there nothing that will help you heal?
 
*
 
There is something comforting when the light
is yellow, billowing despondency
that you imagine would glow in a glass,
an aura around the brokenhearted
whose faces you don’t need to see to know.
 
*
 
The banging halyard in concert with the
campanula of bell buoys, the language
in the mist, always urgent, always taut;
even with good news the voices are tense.
When you have nothing left to say – what then?
 
*
 
After the crash, after your boy was killed,
you became a shattered pane of stained glass.
Sleeplessly unconscious, your words came like
shards of January light breaking you;
the fragments need shoring, the heart comfort.
  
*
 
Others remain after the fallen leaves,
harnessing camanchaca, the creeping fog
that you imagine would glow in a glass.
Even with good news the voices are tense;
the fragments need shoring, the heart comfort.
 
 

 
  
The Fallen Leaves - II
              -for Sam and Teri Norman, and for Ben.
 
                               -The Things that never can come back, are several --
                                Childhood — some forms of Hope — the Dead --
                                                                                                                            -Emily Dickinson
 
We cannot blame the fog or blame the fallen leaves.
You are just gone; how can we blame the fallen leaves?
 
There was rain that night, and fog, and then you vanished.
This wasn’t fog’s plan, or the aim of fallen leaves.
 
People milled about in the yellow light of fog,
dazed and sad, not seeking the plane of fallen leaves.
 
Mourners bundled in rain gear; I did not know them;
they meant well when they came upon the fallen leaves.
 
In your absence, those you love will try to exist;
broken, they embrace the remaining fallen leaves.
 
The tree will still be there, and the stones on the road;
the same ruts will be there, and the same fallen leaves.
 
On the table are strewn a thousand photographs,
as if the pile had been raked and named fallen leaves.
 
The Things that never can come back, are several –
some go, others remain after the fallen leaves.