Back from the Fields
Until nightfall my son ran in the
fields,
looking for God knows what.
Flowers, perhaps. Odd birds on the wing.
Something to fill an empty spot.
Maybe a luminous angel
or a country girl with a secret dark.
He came back empty-handed,
or so I thought.
Now I find them:
thistles, goatheads,
the barbed weeds
all those with hooks or horns
the snaggle-toothed, the grinning ones
those wearing lantern jaws,
old ones in beards, leapers
in silk leggings, the multiple
pocked moons and spiny satellites, all those
with juices and saps
like the fingers of thieves
nation after nation of grasses
that dig in, that burrow, that hug winds
and grab handholds
in whatever lean place.
It's been a good day.
****************************
Aubade in Autumn
This morning, from under the
floorboards
of the room in which I write,
Lawrence the handyman is singing the
blues
in a soft falsetto as he works, the
words
unclear, though surely one of them is love,
lugging its shadow of sadness into
song.
I don’t want to think about sadness;
there’s never a lack of it.
I want to sit quietly for a while
and listen to my father making
a joyful sound unto his mirror
as he shaves—slap of razor
against the strop, the familiar rasp of
his voice
singing his favorite hymn, but faint
now,
coming from so far back in time:
Oh, come to the church in the wildwood . . .
my father, who had no faith, but loved
how the long, ascending syllable of wild
echoed from the walls in celebration
as the morning opened around him . . .
as now it opens around me, the light
shifting
in the leaf-fall of the pear tree and
across
the bedraggled back-yard roses
that I have been careless of
but brighten the air, nevertheless.
Who am I, if not one who listens
for words to stir from the silences
they keep?
Love is the ground note; we cannot do
without it or the sorrow of its
changes.
Come to the wildwood, love,
Oh, to the wiiildwood as the morning deepens,
and from a branch in the cedar tree a
small bird
quickens his song into the blue reaches
of heaven—
hey sweetie sweetie hey.
