“When two people relate to each other authentically and humanly, 
God is the electricity that surges between them.” —M. Buber

Visitors were greeted with love, and settled 
into a quiet ambiance as they sipped wine, ate 
crackers spread with Brie. Such was a house that filled others, 
and others filled such a house. Pictures hung

as though planted deep in the walls, and the floors 
were the solid footing of earth itself; everything thrived 
with harmony of the good people who owned such a home,
the porch occasionally bowing in honor of the moon.

Years passed, first one of them died and amputated the house. 
The house went on, but it limped a little in the right leg. 
When the remaining partner followed, everything else
in the house fell ill. Those who extended condolences

could feel the couple as they inhabited objects
collected over the years; shelved books, pottery from village
artists, hand hewn wood pieces. What was in the atoms 
of their belongings, months later, went on to join the couple. 

The house no longer limped.
                        

It was a day cold as granite
when I relaxed in the Windsor rocker,
 
you, my young son cradled into me.
Outside, banks of gray-slush,
 
elm trees stark and still,
your breath against my breast.
 
O, firstborn, how silently bleak
that dastardly month of March,
 
when drag of time slogged across the clock.
I longed for summer, to push
 
your carriage along the sidewalk,
dangle my feet in the park’s stream.
 
For ages, a mother might sit, 
waiting for the rains to wash away the gray,
 
to quell the tied-down days,
for sunshine to finally splash through windows.
                        

For months I mourned the loss of his promise, the twist fate creates,
copies of his unfinished poems cremated with him,
he, my most gifted student, the one who grieved the large

which is difficult to break down into the comprehensible,
died of hepatitis C when all I’d asked was, he return 
to the world a free man as the next chapter

in his splendid evolution, a man become so learned he was nearly
a book, or should I say encyclopedia? His eyes rimed with dark circles
as though sleep vacationed, long lanky form in blue jeans and chambray,

nearly beautiful, fingers of a piano player or perhaps sculptor.
Countless times I entered the prison’s yard, he there in the sally port,
waiting to help me carry in bags of books, notepad paper, pencils.

I don’t know why some die young, their promise gone to flame,
or why the words of Roethke come back to haunt me,
“I wake to sleep and take my waking slow.” 

I think of Patrick’s poems as starlings that fill the sky, strong
and direct by how they turn their surrounding sounds
into their own calls, which by the way, is how a poem gets written.