sonnet for the bird with the hollow song

i care no more for your enthralling song
your recitals i refuse to attend
those once-beloved lyrics now all but gone
with that performance, i cannot pretend

i am left more cautious since i have heard
your siren sound tempting my ships to harm
how you caroled us with your cloying words
and burned us with the bitters of your charm

now you've flown to feed upon new goodness
to trill your story for another soul
with fresh audience, no need to confess
to the deceit that exacted this toll

you flew alone by force of your own wing
from a cause you invented, did you sing

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three leaves

these last days of autumn

shimmer down to something
close to the moment before
sleep, when the world outside
contracts into darkness and
the ether of dreams comes
drifting

out a dining room window
of our simple maine farmhouse
a red maple stands with half his leaves
still blazing, still clinging
to branch, while two thousand miles
away they eulogize my uncle

who was my father's best
friend, chumming together in a
small maine town in the 1950s and
who married my father's sister,
thus becoming family, and who,
like that indomitable maple, let fly
a thousand brilliant souls each year

there is a launching in a death
a love in a passing on
a joy in a giving forward
a strength in a receiving
an awakening in a faith
a salt in a sweat of real toil

i look at my shedding maple
while a northeastern rain tamps
down a landscape that has become
a watercolor painting while on
the radio simon and garfunkel
carol about bookends

i love jack's youngest boy
like a brother, more than i
loved jack i suppose
but only because i knew the boy
more than i knew the father;
we were chums of a different
age while our fathers looked on

a physical relationship
made fallow by the circumstance
of distance but a love and
kindredness bonded by a conjuring
unknown to either; our affection
a hit-or-miss lesson found in the
mysteries of tornadoes and falling stars

jack left maine years ago, took
his wife and their children across
the wide world, to build bridges
between men and god; to sing of
a savior to whom he devoted his
life; to pray; to prostrate himself

there is distance in time
and in space but not
in blood, so this poet calls
across the separating miles
while he stands at the trunk
of his dripping maple to
ponder the fallen at his feet

to find three leaves in
communion among a thousand
in a placid congregation.
how my eyes fell on these three
is a question for the interpreter of
fortuity; all i care about is
that i am here, awake

jack was an orphaned irish baby
from boston who came to maine
in youth and who played baseball
and basketball and ran track with
my father - that's history
i've seen all the black-and-whites

two men hatched in poverty
but rich in something else,
something made of the iron
of will and fortitude of soul;
how they both bled from their
flesh and cried from it to
no one but their own hearts

there is nothing more
eloquent about the men
of that generation than how
their graciousness in maturity
was informed by the tribulations
in their youth

i believe in the lesson there,
i'm attracted to the value of
their constructs: how, brick
by brick, they fashioned a life
for their families in the form
of a thousand selfless decisions

my brother daniel and his siblings,
progeny of the felled man,
is living my foremost fear
as they now are witness to the
coming of an age in which
the foundation of their lives
has been smashed

i took a picture of the three
leaves at the base of the tree because,
of all those countless gifts,
these three measured the most
and blazed most brilliantly
and came to rest in a certain
embrace at the feet of their
beloved giver

all great good men
stand for something
larger than themselves by
the exquisiteness of
their humility. the
shadow they cast is thrown across
time and space, no impediment

and while his generosity was spread
and spread wide, his gift of fatherly
charity coursed through his limbs
and infused into the hearts of all
those receivers, i believe
it lingers most in the
blood of his children to whom i
bow as i do to these
three leaves

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blur

we were married in a sage masonic 
meetinghouse during our descent,
on the stage of that stoic hall, as
part of a late september day dressed 
with mist and autumn removals

it was a fine place, yet what is a 
place but a context into which
we rain our droplets of time 
that we manage to 
stir into something like a life

my brother took pictures for us, do you 
remember this? and nearly none of the prints 
came out, those vague images now - in looking on 
them today - a reminder of how nostalgia is 
really just a meander through a flustering fog

let us, you and i, go back for a bit right
here, through that narrow aperture of memory, 
and think on the day with the vision of two lovers
who are bowed against a headwind that
seems always to shoulder against us

and recall how it was all an ambition
toward gaining a certain quarter that we've not
ever been given, not really, but let's
not forget the moment or pretend
that we received our desired acceptances

i want nothing more now than what that
would feel like for you, whose 
blessings were lost in the smirking
visages of all those foreigners who claimed to
be in the blood, saints abroad indeed

i know the pithy insults and where they
were aimed, and i know that they struck you
with a velocity and were tipped with a poison
meant to topple you, to bring your towers back
down to this earth in a smoulder

it was a rebuke from a loveless crowd,
a riot of the yearning, whose tongues 
wielded a lash of resentment against the
bride and her joys with their eyes turned
away from their own hands

regardless

think on this day with me and recall the
table rows with their wood-slatted chairs
and the picket fencing we set against the
front of the stage encurled by white christmas
lights, and think on the bales of hay we brought in

the cornstalks we stood about and the baskets
we filled with gourds of the season; the 
tables we laid with country favors; the
dress made by my niece and the children
standing as the truest of witnesses

how you wanted so much to host it in the back
yard of our village farm, where the landscape 
was framed by the rows of maples and pines
and what small pasture we had sloped down to a 
pond overspread with the discarded colors of fall

the weather conspired and turned us out and 
sent us inside, but thinking on it now i wish 
we had forced the pharisees to stand 
outside with us to feel the same palsying 
cold from the rain that we felt from their carping

no i don't
in fact i don't
i know i don't 
i'd not join their
ranks for gold

after all

we cannot change
the hearts of the vile 
anymore than we can
change the whip of the wind
or history in its watery hold

but how i fight against the
wishing and the wanting; how i
push against the yearning for a
salvation from my sins, a confession
that once went out to my beloved

as if they are the stewards
the keepers the guarantors
the angels the founders
the givers the makers the 
healers and the true

all of it nonsense

the truth of the present hurt is in the
way in which we stand before the mirror
now and consult not the confidences
in our passion, but the braying echoes
from past jurors

whose evidences against us were 
smaller than the incrimination
we laid against ourselves,
and the sentence we administered
was self-inflicted 

because where are the judges now?
in their hovels again, waiting to
spring on another so-and-so
whose tumble will set their tongues 
wagging once again

there is a reason why we see the dark 
whenever there is light all around,
why we paddle against each other
in an endless round when we're sharing the
same shuttle on the same intrepid sea

i want our photos be left to 
blur and seen not as an omen to the
vex that we felt came from fate
but as a symbol for our real passion

that leaves all the gallery scowling
as they squint at us in their
frustration for not being able to quite make
us out; quite make us clear no matter how 
hard they look or demand our focus

i'm a poet in a mood on this october day
and i spy a single maple with two different
plumes of color; two crowns for a single
tree as if two lovers conjoined sinfully in
a violence of passion

it looks like mist is coming this way
and i'm casting across time for you
and for me with its warps and its
evaporations until we stand, again
in that hall, happily blurred

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cicada bottle summer

the kids just last week presented to me a
trim, stunted bottle unearthed by the rooting snouts of the
piglets in our garden bed out back
where the soil is still a rich virgin black.

i placed the vial on the sill of our kitchen window
above the sink and it still held the earth in it;
so besodded that the light outside labored against
an obscure passage through its thick glass:
the random specks of dirt constellations in an
unfocused universe

and so it is with memory, which is constantly
strained through the gauze of time,
filtered and abridged to the point of it all approaching
mere romance when it comes calling to the fore on
some trigger

like it did when i considered the bottle on its
new perch, with the world of light outside
peering back through it to me as i peered at
the world through the vial and in a moment i was
reminded of the cicadas and one summer day

(i am told to avoid the sentimental by sticking to
the showing of things and not the telling and by turning
the hand to the figurative and leaving the abstract out
in the withering cold - so i will attempt to here, but in truth i
am in love with this memory, all joy)

how my brother took me digging for bottles in august
one year when i was - perhaps - 10? that sounds about
right because i ached differently at 10 than i did at
13 when he was 20 and no longer at home

what lived inside of our conversation that day i do not
know, but i pretend to know by assigning this broader truth:
we said little, the way the mature and the immature
say little of substance to each other because of the
gap in age and understanding; especially brothers

this half-fiction, therefore, would have other voices in it:
namely the creak of the metal bucket that swung in one
of his hands while the other gripped the short handle
of our father's spade that my brother bore on a broad shoulder,
twirling the metal of the spade like a boat's propeller

or the flop of his Converses onto tar in our perspiry push
up hill against invisible wave on wave of swelter; how
our eyes stung against it and our lungs were filled with
the density of haze

or the cry of the dog day cicadas stuck in the limbs of
leafy ash and sugar maples and birches that stood
on either side in their own dense congregations; how
their everlasting saw was a hymnal to some prevailing dream echoing
a song of end-of-summer longing that hummed in my own heart

my brother borrowed the idea of bottle hunting from our
uncle, who scavenged for them as well, unearthing such
colorful curiosities of medicine glass that he would clean
and sell to various collectors

and my brother took it up and was adept at their discovery;
mining his own modest collections of blues and greens,
rounded and squared, long-necked and snub-nosed
that he too scrubbed, but that he kept for himself

posting his finds on window sills in his own bedroom
or upon the sills around our home. i marveled at their
altered optics, how staring through the antique glassware
was a lull toward divergent moods

the lighter colored bottles had me thinking of the
weightlessness of clouds observed from one's back in
a pasture; the darker colors of the fate of fallen leaves
into an autumn brook and how they could never resist the pull

he stopped at the top of the hill in front of a house and
he said he had been told it used to all be
farmland up here and how farmland was perfect for the
burial places of back-in-the-day houses and outbuildings

that all that was left were usually field stone foundations filled
in by the collapsed wooden bones of buildings,
piled upon by time with earth and leaves; that hidden beneath
that, with the point of the driven spade, could be found the bottles

i was a mere page to the leader of a great enterprise; on an
exploration led by a man knowing of the unknown world;
i marveled much less at the landscape than i did the shadow
that he cast across it, as younger brothers are apt to do of the older

all that needed to happen, he said, was permission from the
owner to allow us behind his property, down a hill to a place
i could barely make out as a thin line of a stone
wall at the edge of woods that, i imagined, once was miles of pasture

my brother rapped on the owner's door and we waited in the heat until a man
emerged daunted. looked my brother over. my brother in a pair of cut-off Levi's
with the bottoms of the pockets dog-panting out from beneath; my brother
with the long hair and a muscle shirt and shouldering a spade

he asked us what. said no to my brother's request. said no to my brother's plea.
come on, man. my little brother with me. just bottles. and then watched us
in a scowl as we walked away back toward home, my brother swearing over
his shoulder at him while i trailed. i was always trailing and looking back

he cursed the way home and spat on about how some people can be
this and some people that and don't tell mom and dad we did this
and here, carry the spade and how he should have just gone to the lake
it was too hot to dig for bottles on a day like this

i carried the spade over my shoulder for a length of the walk, then switched
it to the other side, then let it drag behind me in the dirt shoulder
while the dog day cicadas wound up in their trees and i listened
wondering about what bottles we had left unearthed in the old man's field

i look at the bottle my children gave to me
and to say what i would say would be
sentimental after all and i see the light seeing
me from the outside and i hear cicadas

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