Night Wind, and: Ghosts: The Absent Father, and: Metro North at Spuyten Duyvil, 7:30 P.M. 9/11/01, and: Dedicated To

Night Wind

"Light splashed" this evening
on the wood-pulp page,
bleached cream, ink stained;
spine folded back in painful
attitude to hold the place
of thoughtful theft and night.
This evening I saw light fail
from silver across the lower bay

to linen above the island's
silhouette skyline pierced
with its thousand window glints.
Grief touched me.

So I hurried up the avenue,
so I have turned in at my doorway,
so I am sitting lamp-lit
in a hard chair
by a dark, east window
which reflects the room.
Out over the plaza hangs suspended
my bed, my table,
myself bent double
over the copy of Kunitz's poem
almost completely gone
under my black scrawl.
The first line lingers:
"Light splashed..."

I regret yesterday
when life seemed possible,
as it did,
as it always did.

Ghosts: The Absent Father

A cross turned upside down will keep the dead out,
but before absence all the old home remedies fail.

By a silted stream, the footpath runs gradually
opening out like memory to a scrub meadow.

There's beauty that could shift to ghastly any moment.
I pass an abandoned house: gray shingles, blank windows.

Two deer stand on the listing porch; four black eyes,
luminous before that ruin. The present tenants, bewildered, silent.

Steam rises from their flanks. They watch me pass;
in the failing light, illuminated. I've come this way before-

after the divorce. My sons left behind asleep.
Abandoning children means you're always haunted.

Their eyes rise guilelessly out of every lengthening shadow,
every innocent face, every calamity.

Metro North at Spuyten Duyvil, 7:30 P.M. 9/11/01

The crash the train makes crossing the bridge
wakes many of them this young morning.

Light reflects off the swells below
and dapples the air of the coach they ride in.

An analyst in her fierce suit drums
her blunt, red nails against the mottled glass.

Opposite, a young trader sleeps on
mouth agape, argyle feet in the aisle.

A foursome, each gray as Nester,
plays hearts with their jackets off.

They are beyond our help already.

Dedicated To

"Most human lives are full of fantasy."

- Adrienne Rich

I imagine you writing your poems alone,
after teaching your last class
in the blue buzzing of fluorescent light
in the clutter of a room emptied
of youth; I imagine you writing your poems
behind a corrugated box in the mailroom
of a major publishing house, cement floor gritty
and the walls painted Municipal Green;
I imagine you writing your poems in a room
above the room where your parents joust,
where the black window hangs your bed
ghostly over the side-yard and the Sycamore
and invites flight; I imagine you writing your poems
as the bus leans into the turn that will carry you
into an unknown future with a predictable ending;
I imagine you writing your poems in the hub-bub
of a baseball game on the radio
as the seasons shift towards the cold;
I imagine you writing your poems in a police station
while waiting for news of the missing, news of the dead;
I imagine you writing your poems by flashlight
in the excitement and ignorance of the young,
who believe in others, too soon, too long;
I imagine you writing your poems through dashed hopes,
absurd longings, the images dancing before your work-a-day eyes,
your dish-pan hands, your adolescent urges;
I am writing mine beside you.