Book of My Nights
Page 3
found it safe inside
our finally untroubled and untroubling gaze,
who wouldn’t hear
what singing completes us?
Build by Flying
I lean on a song.
I follow a story.
I keep my mother waiting
when she asks, How long
before the wren finishes the grain?
How soon until we see
what a house the birds
build by flying? In the dream
in which I stopped with her
under branches, on the long way home from school,
one of us, curious
about the fruit overhead, asked:
To what port has the fragrance so lately
embarked, for whose tables?
One of us waited for the answer.
And one went on alone,
singing. And all the place
there was grew out of listening.
In the Beginning
A woman is speaking in a place of rocks.
Her voice is the water of that place
and founds the time there.
She says the world, begun out of nothing,
stands by turning
out of grasp, a lover’s yes and no,
stay and go, singing stepping
in and out of time and momentum,
the body’s doctrine
of need and scarcity,
the heart’s full measure
of night and day, sons and daughters.
A woman is talking. Her voice
is a boat and oars in a place of rocks.
Stranded in a rocky place,
it is a garment torn to pieces.
It is the light,
accomplished by wind and fire,
abiding inside the rocks.
A memory of the sea, it’s what remains.
Homesickness in the rocks.
Homecoming in the trees.
The Other Hours
When I look at the ocean, I see
a house in various stages of ruin and beginning.
When I listen to the wind in the trees,
I hear—or is it someone inside me hears—
the far voice of a woman reading out loud
from a book that opens everywhere onto day.
Her voice makes a place, and the birds
go there carrying nothing but the sky.
When I think about the hills where I was born,
someone—is he inside me? Beside me?
Does he have a mother or father, brother or sister?
Is he my dismembered story
fed to the unvanquished roses?
Is he the rosebud packed in sleep and fire,
counted, tendered, herded toward the meeting foretold?
Which of us is awake tonight?
Which of us is the lamp? Which the shadow?
Someone who won’t answer remembers laughter
that sires the rocks and trees,
that fetches in its ancient skirts
the fateful fruits and seeds.
The Hammock
When I lay my head in my mother’s lap
I think how day hides the stars,
the way I lay hidden once, waiting
inside my mother’s singing to herself. And I remember
how she carried me on her back
between home and the kindergarten,
once each morning and once each afternoon.
I don’t know what my mother’s thinking.
When my son lays his head in my lap, I wonder:
Do his father’s kisses keep his father’s worries
from becoming his? I think, Dear God, and remember
there are stars we haven’t heard from yet:
They have so far to arrive. Amen,
I think, and I feel almost comforted.
I’ve no idea what my child is thinking.
Between two unknowns, I live my life.
Between my mother’s hopes, older than I am
by coming before me, and my child’s wishes, older than I am
by outliving me. And what’s it like?
Is it a door, and good-bye on either side?
A window, and eternity on either side?
Yes, and a little singing between two great rests.
The Eternal Son
Someone’s thinking about his mother tonight.
The wakeful son
of a parent who hardly sleeps,
the sleepless father of his own
restless child, God, is it you?
Is it me? Do you have a mother?
Who mixes flour and sugar
for your birthday cake?
Who stirs slumber and remembrance
in a song for your bedtime?
If you’re the cry enjoining dawn,
who birthed you?
If you’re the bell tolling night
without circumference, who rocked you?
Someone’s separating
the white grains of his insomnia
from the black seeds
of his sleep.
If it isn’t you, God, it must be me.
My mother’s eternal son,
I can’t hear the rain without thinking
it’s her in the next room
folding our clothes to lay inside a suitcase.
And now she’s counting her money
on the bed, the good paper
and the paper from the other country
in separate heaps.
If day comes soon, she could buy our passage.
But if our lot is the rest of the night,
we’ll have to trust unseen hands
to hand us toward ever deeper sleep.
Then I’ll be the crumb
at the bottom of her pocket,
and she can keep me
or sow me on the water,
as she pleases. Anyway,
she has too much to carry, she who knows
night must tell the rest of every story.
Now she’s wondering about the sea.
She can’t tell if the white foam laughs
I was born dark! while it spins
opposite the momentum of our dying,
or do the waves journey beyond
the name of every country
and the changing color of her hair.
And if she’s weeping,
it’s because she’s misplaced
both of our childhoods.
And if she’s humming, it’s because
she’s heard the name of life:
A name, but no name, the dove
bereft of memory and finally singing
how the light happened
to one who gave up
ever looking back.
A Dove! I Said
A dove! I said.
What I meant was all the colors
from ashes to singing.
What I meant was news
of my death,
a threshold
dividing my unmade tears
from the finished song.
Night, I said.
As in, Night after night,
as in, Every night is two nights,
a house under a hill. Night,
as in, Night adds to night
without remainder,
and all the nights are one
night, a book
whose every word is outcome,
whose every page is lifelong sentence.
What I meant was the wind
burying the dead.
What I should have said was:
A hand fallen still
at the foot of the burning hours,
paused between the written and the unwritten.
It was a mourning dove in my eaves.
And maybe I meant to say:
Child of time.
Maybe I should have called out:
Child of eternity.
Or did I only me
an to ask, Whose face
did I glimpse last night in a dream?
Fill and Fall
As long as night is one country
on both sides of my window, I remain a face
dreaming a face
and trace the heart’s steep path: Night
and falling.
There’s no place
my hand, full of its own going away,
ever found along a body
falling beside me.
And the way to the crowning grapes lies sealed
to all but one who’s heard
what nights are for: Falling,
as water falls
to fill and fall, overwhelming
basin after basin,
as each must kneel
inside himself to find
the tiered slopes
only brimming masters.
Dwelling
As though touching her
might make him known to himself,
as though his hand moving
over her body might find who
he is, as though he lay inside her, a country
his hand’s traveling uncovered,
as though such a country arose
continually up out of her
to meet his hand’s setting forth and setting forth.
And the places on her body have no names.
And she is what’s immense about the night.
And their clothes on the floor are arranged
for forgetfulness.
Echo and Shadow
A room
and a room. And between them
she leans in the doorway
to say something,
lintel bright above her face,
threshold dark beneath her feet,
her hands behind her head gathering
her hair to tie and tuck at the nape.
A world and a world.
Dying and not dying.
And between them
the curtains blowing
and the shadows they make on her body,
a shadow of birds, a single flock,
a myriad body of wings and cries
turning and diving in complex unison.
Shadow of bells,
or the shadow of the sound
they make in the air, mornings, evenings,
everywhere I wait for her,
as even now her voice
seems a lasting echo
of my heart’s calling me home, its story
an ocean beyond my human beginning,
each wave tolling the whole note
of my outcome and belonging.
Restless
I can hear in your voice
you were born in one country
and will die in another,
and where you live is where you’ll be buried,
and when you dream it’s where you were born,
and the moon never hangs in both skies
on the same night,
and that’s why you think the moon has a sister,
that’s why your day is hostage to your nights,
and that’s why you can’t sleep except by forgetting,
you can’t love except by remembering.
And that’s why you’re divided: yes and no.
I want to die. I want to live.
Never go away. Leave me alone.
I can hear by what you say
your first words must have been mother and father.
Even before your own name, mother.
Long before amen, father.
And you put one word in your left shoe,
one in your right, and you go walking.
And when you lie down you tuck them
under your pillow, where they give rise
to other words: childhood, fate, and rescue.
Heaven, wine, return.
And even god and death are offspring.
Even world is begotten, even summer
a descendant. And the apple tree. Look and see
the entire lineage alive
in every leaf and branching
decision, snug inside each fast bud,
together in the flower, and again
in the pulp, mingling in the fragrance
of the first mouthful and the last.
I can tell by your silence you’ve seen the petals
immense in their vanishing.
Flying, they build your only dwelling.
Falling, they sow shadows at your feet.
And when you close your eyes
you can hear the ancient fountains
from which they derive,
rock and water ceaselessly declaring
the laws of coming and going.
Stations of the Sea
Regarding springtime, what is there to conclude?
One wing, I fall,
a third of the sum of flying.
Once forsaken, I remain
hidden in the dust, a mortal threshold
unearthed by crying.
Crying, my body turns to dark petals.
And of all the rooms in my childhood,
God was the largest
and most empty.
Of all my playmates,
my buried brother was the quietest,
never giving away my hiding place
where, my mother’s Little-Know-Nothing,
I still await the dawning in my heart
of a name my mother and father never gave me,
my brothers and sisters never called me,
the name foretold
prior to my birth on any tree.
Among the roots, the dead
teem, memory of them
a storied amber risen
in my flesh.
Throughout the leaves, the wind,
unsurrounded, is reciting
the stations of the sea.
Buried Heart
The hyacinth emerges headlong dying,
one of the colors of ongoing
and good-bye,
its odor my very body’s smokeless burning,
its voice
night’s own dark lap.
Above ground, the crown of flowers tells the wish
brooding earth stitched inside the bulb.
In another kingdom, it was the wick
the lamp cradled, strands
assembled in rapt slumber.
Tonight it’s a branching stair
the dead climb up to a hundred eyes enthroned,
and yet the hair I climb down
toward an earlier dream
and what I’ve always known:
Whoever lets the flowers fall
suffers his heart’s withering
and growing scales,
whoever buries that horned root
inside himself becomes the ground
that sings, declaring a new circumference
even the stars enlarge by crowding down to hear.
Out of Hiding
Someone said my name in the garden,
while I grew smaller
in the spreading shadow of the peonies,
grew larger by my absence to another,
grew older among the ants, ancient
under the opening heads of the flowers,
new to myself, and stranger.
When I heard my name again, it sounded far,
like the name of the child next door,
or a favorite cousin visiting for the summer,
while the quiet seemed my true name,
a near and inaudible singing
born of hidden ground.
Quiet to quiet, I called back.
And the birds declared my whereabouts all morning.
Acknowledgments
My thanks go out to the editors of the following publications in whose pages several sections of this book have appeared: The Best American Poetry of 1998, The Breadloaf Anthology of Comtemporary American Poetry, DoubleTake, The English Record, The Iron Ho
rse Literary Review, The Kenyon Review, TriQuarterly, Water-Stone.
I would like to express my sincerest gratitude to the Illinois Arts Council, the Lannan Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts for financial assistance that made the writing of these poems possible.