Those were days when we burned lights late into the night. From space you could see the glaze of mercury- and argon-lit signals of our restlessness and boredom.

Those were days when we went into space, some of us looking for something out there. Others (a few) spent their lives looking inside,privileging those glances, waiting for the rest to join hands. But it was all to find out who we were. So we could improve ourselves.

We discovered a lot of interesting things. The universe is expanding. It’s probable there’s life on other planets. The sun is mostly hydrogen. Our lives are built on chains of self-replicating proteins. Like gravity and electrostatic repulsion, love and hate serve survival purposes, as well as creating a lot of interesting social situations. Light behaves sometimes like particles, other times like waves. And so on.

To get to space required a lot of ingenuity. It was a predictable outcome of our capacity to wonder, a kind of sublimated hunger. And lots of fuel. We used a lot of fuel in those days. The stuff that lifted junk and us away from the pull of gravity was also mother hydrogen, pure, what we aimed for, ultimately. Though what fueled its making here wasn’t any old chain reaction, just a lot of dirt with a little bit of light left in it.

We thought we were big shots then, converting all that memory of movement back into movement. As though carbon were the big news, beating out the more popular wonders of the galaxy: helium, silver, even silicon, which gave us faster knowledge.

Though knowing is only half the battle. It is not meat or drink, it is not salvation, which asks a sacrifice, an appeal to something greater than our particular selves. We did a lot of driving on that dirt. We got from here to there and back again. Sometimes for more defensible reasons, like to eat and sleep in a relatively civilized way. Sometimes just to have a look around, Sundays and summers especially. That was nice.

So eat your vegetables, and huddle up. It’s likely going to be a cold century.

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Death wants to turn me into nothing.
Death hates me.
Death doesn’t care about my feelings.
Death is rude.

Death tells me that my feelings are trite,
that my thoughts are inaccurate,
that my actions are all in vain.

Death wants to come at me with a twelve-pound hammer and crack my skull,
with a handful of knives and slice me slowly into bleeding pieces,
with microbes that will make me shit and puke my life away.

Death stands there with an expression that is both smile and sneer.
Death holds out its arms to me.

Death wants to embrace me,
hold me against its enormous breast,
nurse me deep.

Death loves me.
Death has been waiting my entire life for me.

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Look how this morning
the light returns to our back yard
and fields behind it.

Now the night is a memory
and in place of the absence
which gives it form
is a color we call black.

And look how on the lawn
the white snow has melted,
revealing circles of green
like islands, some,

or little planets scattered
and forming, in my mind,
a kind of constellation,

and others massed, whole galaxies,
or, as some call them,
patches, as if the ground
were quilted with them.

And how, under its sheet of snow
the yard merges with the sleeping
field and its yellow stubble.
Or dun, or brown, or ochre.

And how the field becomes a hill,
climbs, becomes trees which
reach up with grey and purple
fingers. Or magenta, or sumac.

Or black, against a sky
where, after three days of rain
and grey, the white clouds part,

touched with a little rose
from the morning sun,
and behind those, blue,

finally, after three days,
and behind that, something
large that we compare,
finally, to night.

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In the hills he thinks
he hears a coyote cry

but I think it is only
a branch sighing against the window

until in the valley
we both hear the wail of a siren.

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Having packed the car perfectly my brother despaired
when I handed him the bag of spent bows and ribbon

his wife had sent me out with. In less than an hour
they were in the lot of the Baltimore Target,

a hundred dollars poorer, a microwave, five glass bowls,
and a Swiffer Jet richer, and the battery in their Explorer dead.

At the hour that they finally left the Sears Auto Shop
(it’s uncharitable of me to confess),

you and I were munching our turkey on whole wheat
and leftover apple-pear pie, overlooking

the Susquehanna Valley, while the already-fallen sun
painted clouds into lace across the winter sky.

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Everywhere this season people are running
toward or away from this day
gobbling down our sharp-cornered greed
or else fleeing in dread

as from a large dog that closes in
the faster we run.
This morning is the day itself
and I say, Come in!

Come in! all you furtive wishes
like stifling ribbons,
choking the life from me,
silencing my deepest wishes.

Come in! all you ulterior motives
and passive aggressive attacks
like knives in the belly
twisting and ripping open the hard, sad center.

Come in! all you lost and lonely
former selves, ennervated and starving,
begging at the stoop
of memory and resentment.

Come on! all you dogs
of fear, devour me!
I’m waiting for you
to shred me to the core,

to cry myself empty
until there’s nothing left
but the blossoming rose
and the trembling over the abyss.

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The taste of Jesus
when I was five
was plastic and white
with a little gold paint,

the booklet of Beatitudes
so crinkled and waxy,
sky blue and warm peach
and creamy.

The music of Jesus
was sweet and sad.
The nails in his palms
like roses.

How I wished
I could join him
up there, so sweetly
suffering,

the rooms of my house
so square and solid,
the blues of the walls
dim in the corners.

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Sitting at a dead man’s desk
in a dead man’s house
prepared for sale

I slide open drawers
to reveal the state
of his real mind –

five plastic tape dispensers,
wooden spoon, Ruder
magnifying glass, pencils

paper clips, ruler.
About what I’d expected.
A Treasury of Humor, photos

of my sister’s lover
at Christmas ten years ago.
On the desktop an old

Seth Thomas, gears buzzing.
And my pen, running
out of ink.

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was a busy day, as
was yesterday.
Tomorrow I have plans to be

busy too, these
tendencies are nothing
I can control, at least

I know what to expect.
Complacent? No.
Jaded? Not yet.

Scared as hell?
It’s possible
I’ll get back to you on that.

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Day of shortest light.
Unremarkable, although
sun hasn’t yet sunk.

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got thrown across
the room
didn’t even bleed but

but a few stitches opened
that’s all
a little dust

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to do list explodes
russian woman sweeping up
bits of paper lying
about my inert body
all chambers emptied

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Not quite brave enough for this world
I read no books old enough to have withstood
kings’ pleasures, or new ones pretending to
the time’s reflection, silver-backed. Or take
no walks at night, not for fear of evil-
doers, only, but thoughts, too. I curl
myself into a self of terry cloth
and gin, amazed by blue shadows dancing,
projected plots. All the fear that’s fit
to package polished, lit, boxed, gone
at a single press of a doubled digit. I look
forward to nothing doing. I lack faith
in an apocalypse. I’ll hire someone
to blow snow, fill cracks, serve. I’ll wait.

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You’re moving between the kitchen island and the stove,
the exquisite smell of freshly grated ginger spicing the air
that otherwise tastes of winter even here, in our kitchen
of oak and glass and certain fabrics and plastics.

You’re tense, mad about something, I feel it’s me,
something I said or didn’t say when I walked through the door
twenty minutes ago. Jesus, didn’t I offer to help?
You let me get out a bigger pan from the drawer

under the oven. Jesus, didn’t I have a long day,
starting with snowblowing the driveway
twelve hours ago? Maybe you’ve had a long day too.
Jesus, haven’t I also? my mind demands.

But it’s not a competition, I can hear myself say
twice in the last two days to two different students,
the first time surprised by my own insight,
the second making points on my own cleverness.

But it is. It is a competition. I feel that I
I feel more tired, lonelier, and more in need
of propping up than anyone else on the planet.
And your back, scarlet in its new cashmere sweater

that I think I may have bought you for Christmas,
accuses me, sitting in black pants, black sweater,
in my armchair on the far side of the kitchen,
where I pour another glass of wine, wine you don’t like,

for all of the efforts of preparation, shipping, selection,
and you pour yourself your own from a bottle
you bought with your own hard, hard wages,
after you said No thank you to my offer.

I take a sip, not understanding what’s so bad
about these particular grapefruit and grassy notes,
as they seem to me. And I wish only
that I could come into the room again

and start over, or take a holiday from tomorrow
with its insistence on compressing tonight’s
spaciousness. Time is not our master, I think,
or rather, it’s a thought that thinks me.

Well, what is it then? I do think,
manhandling the wheel of my own feeble engine
of ideas. But then the scratch of sulfur on carbon
makes me look up to see you lighting

a candle in a little green glass cup and setting
it on the table, and suddenly I want to start crying.

December 17, 2007

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Riven to pieces
the snow has hopes
of a big reunion.

Home from a cookie-
decorating party, sheaves
loom on my desk.

All day my heart
has been clenched
in its watchband.

Will snow be enough
to soothe
my hot pillow?

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Really to feel the pen
in my hand,
and the absence to which I dedicate it.

Really to remember my brother’s hands
on my throat,
and my mother’s hand over my mouth
and nose — crying please
don’t cry. Please.

Really to smell the smell of snow
blown in
on a cold nor’easter in December.

Dry snow, and lots of it, and beautiful
for that, for its atomity.

Really to feel the strain in drawing in
a full breath.
Really to feel the emptiness
when I exhale.

The universe comes down to four forces
which may, most people hope
who know, be one.
But I say, let them be two:

To really know, and to have
no idea, really.

December 15, 2007

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In tears this morning
at the agony of being alone,

telling you about it, wanting you
to see the real me, the invisible self

(impossible need), I found
in the pain itself, for a moment,

like a star, the answer I was seeking.
Then why did I find it necessary

to drive an hour this afternoon
to a zendo in the middle of Nowhere,

New York, where the topic was
a Zen approach to whatever

this life of suffering is? And why
did I fail to reach it for the second time

in two weeks? Last time I was late
and turned around halfway.

Today, it just didn’t seem to exist.
No such number, no such road,

just anxious drivers behind me,
and mud on my fenders

from old snow, and sand, and salt.
Some kind of allegory? Some kind of lesson?

On the way home, hungry for forbidden
coffee and pumpkin pie,

but all the diners closed
in this liminal part of the afternoon

I settle for McDonald’s,
and chocolate-chip cookies,

music blaring from Rochester’s
“Official Christmas Radio Station”

over the noise of the Coke machine
compressor, and two ladies yakking.

By some chance, one of the windows
looks out over Conesus Lake,

the banks dressed in ice
like a lace collaret, and a slow

flock of mallards sinking
with the sun on the western shore.

December 8, 2007

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