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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