Poems

Old Teams

Not one of them still walks among us,
who can stand and talk and bicker
and make love; they've lost their footing
in the world, gone under
pitch and pool, run off the tracks
where they once circled, golden-thighed
and sprightlier than crowds of lookers-on.
They've gone, the golfers in their wool
   plus-fours,
the divers in the suits with shoulder straps,
the quarterbacks in close-fit, leather helmets.
Looking in their eyes, behind the glass,
the glaze of decades, I can only wonder
what they make of me, this hovering
compassionate blank gaze from time beyond.
They would have to know
that I was coming, that I would love them,
as I really do, for their blear innocence
and their fool faith in life to come.

Poem with Allusions

The thoughts that come on little cat feet
aren't mine, of course.
I'm prey to everything they've said,
and half believe in heaven and its hymns.
I've made my way through Chapman's Homer
and was so impressed.
I've watched my hands, like ragged claws,
crawl over you at night.
You didn't seem to mind.
You've read a lot and heard a lot.
We all have, dear.
We don't know who said what to whom
or why or when. The faces in the metro
look the same, each having been
through birth and copulation, even death itself.
I had not thought death had undone so many.
In country churchyards on the mossy stones,
their epitaphs may not impress the judges,
but they won't much care.

Leo

You were here before me, Leo:
father and my son.

I see your circle as it shines
through sunny haze—

a large unbroken circle
that encloses all my days.

I come and go, dear Leo,
in a world below

your arcing rainbow.
I am lost and won.

I walk this passage in-between.
I'm seen, unseen.

But you are luminous,
enormous, porous

and surrounding name.
Your single flame

warms both my hands,
my either side

on this cold passage
through an age

where everyone was born
before they died.

Not you, my Leo:
here before me and long after,

fiery constellation,
father and my son.

High School

Everyone must go there.
None returns.

One sees the boys get into line,
Their first mustache more like a wish
above their lips. The girls stand
parallel and pure, some of them bleeding,
all of them afraid. They've seen

their older sisters taken. They have seen
their older brothers, too,
assimilated, saturated, swept.

The hot brick building is a kind of furnace.
They're its fuel.

The hot brick building is a kind of maw
that feeds to frenzy.

Everyone must go there.
None returns.

The Immigrant

Catch me, if you can.
I'm barefoot, running over cobbles,
skipping school in Avelino.
They have said America is far
but sweet, and I believe them,
sitting in the hayloft,
spent, as late September's
cutting swells below me
in the loose-thatched barn.
I'm sixteen, standing
by the lathe as nonno guides
my hand in fashioning
a rafter that will hold aloft
my father's roof for years
to come. I'm milking goats
at five, dawn-whiskered,
scattering the seed
for hungry chickens in the yard,
and just as hungry,
packing bags, imagining
a life I'll make
beyond them on the other side.
My mother's eyelids
flutter at my lips. My father
sighs. He doesn't understand
already I am gone,
already living and between
two worlds: one lost on purpose
and the other plunging in the fog
ahead, an island
of high towers, glistening streets,
and glad, gold hands.

Autumn Reel

I'm reeling as the last gold light
winds back upon its spool. October
ends, once for all.

Wasps flutter at the windowpane and fail,
but geese know better
as they fly to southerly affairs.

It's difficult...