They are all gone into the world of light!
—Henry Vaughan
 
We are all gone into the world of light—
snowblind, sure, but more, as today's all 
ashine with sun-struck ice coating walkways
and car roofs, glinting off windows,
stunning garbage can and back stoop alike.
It dazzles both eye and heart to see, to feel, 
to know the old ache of an ever-melting 
brightness we can never touch, like music, 
or breath, or the look in the eye of a child 
no more a child. We are all gone before
we rightly arrive, and that is the sweetness
of it, and that is the cold of light leaving.
                        

Piseco Lake, August 2007
 
 
Accompanied only by 
my dog, I bury Dad's ashes
in the rock garden.
 
Mom asked for no fuss,
no ceremony at all,
but I invent my own:
 
rinsing this jar
his ashes came in 
with Piseco Lake
 
water, then pouring it
slowly over the ash
and dirt and mint
 
green still in displaced
earth—a small shower
that says water we are
 
and water we shall be.
Dad, who rowed into
and out of the mist
 
every morning on this
long loved lake, might
as well rest here
 
as in any supernal
cloud, or marked by
a chiseled stone.
 
Who was water then
is water now.
Blood, sperm, tears, 
 
the sweat of fever,
all salted with what
we might as well call
 
love, and so I do.

To His Books
—Henry Vaughan
 
On an Adirondack path
near Fall Lake my dog
halts to puzzle over
a glossy black mass
of what was once
a squirrel, perhaps,
or day-shy mink—
no way to tell what,
the stink so far advanced
all that's left are a few gobs
of flesh dark as leaf rot,
a couple tufts of fur;
 
so the shock of shocks
comes when, as I bend
to tug my dog's collar,
the heap suddenly shifts, 
that horror-flesh 
somehow alive, dissolved 
muscles still seething 
in rank air, a vanished 
leg twitching;
 
and though it takes but 
a moment for reason
to suggest the truth, 
a beetle colony busy
in that corpse, their shells
shiny with bright yellow 
strips—color of warning
now rising amidst the awful
jelly, then sinking again—
 
though the moment passes
and earth resumes
its laws, it is time enough
to smell the horrid stench
that cannot fade even
in sweetest air.