Some Holy Saturday

​

you will rise from your bed at four-thirty in the morning, 

to find bitter weeping outside your window

and your yard filled with trees that were not there the night

       before,

large leaves everywhere soaking your hair with dew,

the thick smell of olives heavy in the air.

It is Peter, still crying

up through the crust of the earth,

and though no cocks have crowed yet,

and there is no farm for hours,

you are poised for the marking of betrayal.

What will you do

if, following Leopard Road or Route 13,

you should be drawn by a congregation of curious crows 

       to Iscariot hanging from a tree,

the neck groove lapping over the rope,

his toga tented at the crotch?

And what if from the moon come strains

of Hollywood’s fourth cousin to Gregorian chant

with celluloid clicks and pops to let you know

this is old and serious?

And what if the man who made the cross

sleepwalks beside the road in the underbrush,

and your father now remembers

that yesterday, between twelve and three,

the sky grew dark over your neighborhood?

Will you kneel down in the road and pray?

Run to your home to take from your kitchen cinnamon and

       nutmeg,

the only spices appropriate for the Savior’s tomb? 

Call the police?

Or walk to your church in silence,

hoping that the sun upon your back

is really the large hand of the fisherman reconciled?

​

​

​
 

Why Shouldn’t I?

​

Why shouldn’t I believe that Lazarus,

moldering in the grave, crawled up and out,

alive and fresh when called forth by Jesus,

or that Jesus could zoom through a locked door

to appear to his followers and let Thomas touch him?

And if I could believe those stories, I asked myself,

what could be so hard about the virgin birth?

My father said he believed in all of it,

and I feared I would be wandering in a desert

without a pillar of cloud to guide me

if I didn’t find ways to believe what he believed.

And never did I want to more than when

a girl I thought I’d never hold told me

I’d have to believe if I wanted her to stay.

(Her breast rested on my arm as she said this.)

Couldn’t it be enough, I asked her, if

I aimed to live a life of never taking

for granted the mouse, the butterfly, the snoring dog?

As for Lazarus, isn’t it enough

to think it a miracle that he got here,

like the rest of us, through the blending of sperm and egg? 

If only I could imagine that anything is possible!

But I saw my father, smart in the way of men

who work with their hands and rely on common sense, 

swindled by slick salesmen’s promises,

like the one of the super-sensitive smoke alarm 

“guaranteed for life and loud enough to wake the dead.” 

Three nights in a row, we ran into the street

in our pajamas because gnats or dust had set it off.

(The company’s whereabouts could not be traced.)

So how then shall I live inside the invisible?

There is no Jesus here for me to touch,

unless it is you, wearing his disguise.

 

 

 

 

Father’s Day

​

No card to send, nowhere to send one,

I remember the concierge telling me

on my way out the door to call home soon.

Afraid of bad news, I went first to Notre Dame

to hear a man missing fingers send up mystical prayers 

to the Holy Spirit through ten thousand pipes.

“I’m a tough timber to crack,” you said after “cancer,” 

your voice strong and sure via satellite.

But you did crack, leaving me lost but still playing 

memories of rituals: backyard baseball,

lunch at the deli, trips to the lumberyard,

slow afternoons on the train station bench,

the devoted waiting for the Spirit of St. Louis,

with her one-chord prelude and her sanctus bell,

to pass through our world with a thousand souls, 

sending up diesel like incense, like prayer.

 

 

 

​

Measuring Distance

​

They blow the whistle by my house 

and a long way down the track.

 

They don’t blow it at yours.

I know that from sitting on your lawn.

 

The train that lumbers to a start near me 

whooshes by the far end of your yard.

 

Today, I tried to see how long I could hear it. 

I was surprised how loud it was so far away—

 

surprised as when a New York FM station 

made me think I was hearing Radio France.

 

I imagined the train passing by your place; 

I can’t exactly say when it faded.

 

What if I called you up some day

and you stood outside with your cordless phone,

 

perhaps the same one your old boyfriend rang 

that broke the spell I had fallen under?

 

(You were sleeping on a blanket.

I was sitting near you, reading poems.)

 

Would we be able, together, to subtract 

the rails between your home and mine?

 

 

 

​

Chance Meeting

​

You are riding on a train,

and since it is such a long trip

and your book is boring,

and since she seems to have nothing to do 

but glance out the window

and once or twice at you,

you cautiously tuck your shyness,

like a bookmark,

into the cheap paperback

you bought in the station

at the last minute

and you say something to her.

It isn’t much of a thing to say — 

something safe —

and yet you feel

as if you are saying

something crucial and awkward

as you did when saying

almost anything in seventh grade.

You scratch your shoulder,

which doesn’t itch,

and you say something like

“Boy, Ohio is really flat” or

“I don’t know if I could live

in this city” and then

she says something back. It isn’t

 

much of anything either. But maybe, 

because you spoke first, or because 

she’s just that way, she sounds

a little more sure of herself.

And perhaps because the train 

clatters along confidently,

you tell each other

where you live and what you do, 

and then you both say that you are 

hungry and wouldn’t mind 

walking the eleven cars

to the snack bar. You agree 

that it would be good

to stretch your legs.

 

On the way,

because the train is swaying,

you link arms for support.

When you squeeze past the conductor, 

rather than going single file,

you turn toward each other

so that you are fairly dancing,

rocking between aisle seats

as if they were couples too.

And when you lose your balance

and fall into a stranger’s lap,

she laughs at you

with that understanding laughter married people have,

and you laugh with her

as though you haven’t laughed

since a year ago November.

 

By the time you return

to your seats, you are talking 

about favorite movies, you are 

telling family stories. And soon 

you are using words like wish 

and imagine, and you imagine 

this could go on forever.

Then the conductor is

calling out her stop,

but she hasn’t heard him

and so must hurry now

to pull her luggage from a rack

and make her way.

There is only time

to shout your number once.

She says she’s got it,

she’ll remember it.

You fiddle with your book.

When you look up,

everyone is watching you and smiling. 

A young boy several seats away

turns on a boombox

and the car is filled with music.

 

 

 

​

We All Have Something of the Poet in Us

​

which is why

the bookstore clerk

passing through aisles

of Danielle Steel

and waiting for new words

has stopped telling her boyfriend 

that she loves him

 

and why the crane operator 

who would take the Phillies 

over Frost any day 

nevertheless searches his mind 

before resigning himself to 

Sweetheart

Darling

Honey

the names already used up 

by previous lovers.

We all want

a new language,

to smell

the musk of sex

for the first time

every time,

to touch the new one’s skin 

clean of history.

 

Let us pray for poetry 

that begins in love

and then moves outward. 

May it fill the mouths

of all who love.

“My dancing tumbleweed,”

the crane operator will say

to his wife on a Sunday walk.

And the bookstore clerk, leaving for 

work, will embrace her beloved in the 

kitchen. “Oh, my hot skillet,” she will say, 

“my deep, deep fryer.”

 

 

 

Haiku Love

​

I want to live

haiku relationships — 

that rich, that defined —

 

believing confinement will 

save me from myself,

or from the other.

 

But then I think

of Schoenberg,

how mathematical music

 

can sound like chaos, 

no melody to sing, 

and I say,

 

Give me sprawling love — the kind that refuses to live in 

twelve tones and seventeen syllables, or even in a short story —

 

that is until

my replacement 

comes along,

 

and everything

is blown to hell,

then couldn’t we have

 

a sonnet,

a sestina,

a villanelle?

 

​

​

​

Why We Need New Year’s Day and the Passage of Seasons

​

Because we are iron in a smithy world

which heats and hammers us beyond self-recognition, 

leaving us slow to learn renewal,

too grumpy or fogged most mornings

to notice that our hearts still surge blood

to every point along the body’s map,

and that our minds are still what computers emulate.

 

After all, even monks with no other life

cannot harness themselves to awareness every second. 

And yet, a garbage collector I know

carries his life like a diamond,

and an exhausted mother

immersed in four-child babble all day

hitches her mind to a book each night,

if only for five minutes,

before she careens into sleep.

 

Praise, then, to the policeman who paints portraits

and to the bank teller who keeps a journal.

Praise to the thwarted shop steward who keeps

his standing appointment to play catch with his child.

Praise to the heartbroken social worker who subscribes

        to the symphony.

Praise to the math teacher who photographs birds 

and to the roofer who, hoping for hope,

believes that next year his team will do better.

 

Praise the toddler and the hospice-dweller

as they stumble in new passages.

Praise all who breathe.

Praise all who once breathed and now nourish the ground. 

Praise all whose stories have already been written

and all those who still have at least one more chance. 

(Seventy times seven, says Jesus,

are the chances we each should have.)

 

Let the fireman remember his own life as he chops 

        with the axe.

Let neither the minister neglect his wife,

nor the doctor her husband.

Let none of us simply swallow our lives whole. 

But if the minister, the doctor, and we should fail, 

let us have new years and fresh seasons.

Let us have seventy times seven chances.