Magic Hour

The soft gold of rust at sunset
lifts itself, a bridge,

And the corn's gone against the drought.

This song is old:

EJ&E
humming itself
into existence
in the distance;

Lake
gracing itself
in waves
among the mills.

Late summer comes
with its parking lot fairs
and old seconds,
recollected neon
piled against
the sudden silence
of coats
and pockets.

Where we are
we have never been;

Where we were
we will be again.

Each Leaf

Each leaf
begs in its own way
among
shadow, cloud,
and sun
for
your young soul to
retrace
old paths
your feet
have written.

Near A Mountain

Near a mountain,
a man
is losing the things
his hands have found.

He watches
the shine
of antenna
in starlight

and hums
the tune of his final days.

A dozen light years
away,
Voyager One and Voyager Two
tease the edges of
vast things.

In 1886,
his great-grandparents
struggle through birth.

He wraps
the entirety of ages
in twine
and Bible verse
and barbed wire

manufactured
in a century
near his own,

in a factory
near Canandaigua
where his people
come from.

About Time

When we were young,

and frost on the windows in winter

reminded us of nothing before us,

and did not cause us

to draw parallels to spiritual realms,

we would have nothing of

giving ourselves to sleep,

or handing ourselves over to the night.

Now, when the winters walk through our streets

like dying old men, and breathe their breath

against our living,

we pivot in the room toward the darkest corners;

corners not covered by the spitting flicker of candle

or imitated light of halogen, mercury, or decaying tungsten,

and we secretly crave sleep—

a caught breath in raging floods.

And the sounds of souls walking the hallways;

of clocks scratching out ages;

of hearts unknowingly slowing;

of winds scouring the face of the earth;

of loose change on the dark-matter pavement—

these things and all things

remember in us only the death of time.

***

Everything was now then,

like bullets through tempered glass;

bombs on airplanes.

I wish I could say we wept and gnashed our teeth,

and read The Waste Land by the sea,

but we did not.

We smoked cigars and laughed,

never hushed at feeling the time pass,

or knowing that there is no time

like time past.

Knowing that the death of time

would be remembered in us.

***

There went a flurry of notes from the score,

racing from one page in a book of billions,

on a shelf of trillions:

There is a trip around the lake,

a fall from the cradle,

a car crash;

            a birthday and a funeral.

There is a vacation out west,

a view of the ocean,

a dead sister . . .

Look, there—

we are sitting on the rocks by the sea,

laughing.

(And now is when I hear the music first;

when you spoke;

in between each word—

notes drifting across the vast waves.

And here is my face turned to stone.)

. . . a last year spent staring at a ceiling,

a lost dog,

a skinned knee . . .

See! There—it has happened;

is clear upon the face of us—

the turning inward and back,

the longing for moments fate-swallowed and gone.

***

The tombstones near the ocean are made from slate,

thin as the second and the hour,

dark as the closing smudge of the sun’s last gasping

at dusk.

The hills should not hold them—

sand-thin and whispering with grass.

The old Bostonians do not care,

and will hear nothing of it,

knowing that time floods away from things

and not through.

Nothing is worn away that was not in some ways already gone.

And so we stood gape-souled near the cemeteries,

nearly gone.

Already gone.

Already

Eyes looking for a now not rushing away,

not sudden,

not dark and echoing in the years

of other people before us.

Gone.

***

We did best to discover early

a life reaching up and touching the infinite:

adoration; confession;

thanksgiving; supplication;

where Christ’s faithless bride taught us to pray:

“I come before you

with praise and adoration

for being who you are—

Creator and Lord of all the universe;

you alone worthy of all praise.”

Yet the old men—those who still pray—

have taken their barges miles from this

among the reeds,

and see the infinite waiting to grasp,

not to be grasped,

and simply cry out

for the frost-gilded panes

of their youth;

to see the play of light

with praise and adoration

behind the glass

for being who you are

and to remain on the edge

and you alone

of knowing it completely.

are worthy.

***

We picked cherries in the summer sun,

and ate ourselves sick on them in the afternoon.

The next day, after hard sleep and a slow morning,

this sickness was forgotten,

easily.

Look, you don’t understand—

there is great light behind this;

the way we so quickly forgot such things;

the way we were so harshly stung by the fruit of the tree

and then were content with only sun and lake-breeze and lunch.

Years later we crave the very afternoons!

When I look at you in those moments of silence,

when the point of talking is lost up in the sway of branches

and the cloying fragrance of fat leaves,

I see you hovering there,

back there,

smelling the rotting tree-fruit on the undergrowth;

craving the drowning-lakes of lands left behind in time,

not space.

Until you catch my eye,

jarred at

touching the shirtsleeves of heaven.

And time digs

hard into the earth;

passes us, its victims,

through the jungle’s teeth.

***

The chirp of the cricket is ancient—

as ancient as imagined—

more ancient nonetheless.

The chirp of the cricket is ancient as lightning.

Its rhythm measures temperature—

so deeply it is ingrained

within the world.

Time moves within the cricket and binds it to the earth.

The moments shimmed between flash and thunder

unravel into distance.

Time moves within the thunder, hammers and holds it

to the face of the world.

The second-hand rounds the watch-face

while we sleep,

and tethers us to the earth—

holds us in a box,

above another box,

until we slip between notches on the clock,

where each cricket before and ever after,

and every storm

are then, now, and next

Each chirp

and momentary flash

pinhole to brighter light behind.

***

The last time we saw the Mackinac Bridge together

we were quite young;

terrified

by web-like cables lofting the monolithic corpse of roadway

to sway above the straits.

The car lurched forward toward predation through the eye of a toll booth,

and we braced ourselves behind the backs of weak parents and vinyl seats

against the roar of the steel grate chewing at the underbelly,

the churning green deep waiting to swallow and to end us.

I traveled the bridge last year

unafraid,

unmoved in the least.

***

Talk of dreams is exhausting,

and you are sleeping, sent to dreams yourself

as I speak.

Nonetheless, you should know that the man

was without a face, and knelt slowly and annoyed

when he saw that I had seen the perfect, full and centered

span of the bridge.

The bridge was in the desert,

and had always seemed incomplete—

not broken, destroyed, or unfinished—

but obscured, as if hidden by the light of the sun.

It ran east to west,

with firm footings on each end:

to the east voices in wind,

signs and wonders;

to the west, fossil records and ice cores.

Regardless,

the man was faceless,

and carried an unloaded gun.

When I approached the height of the span

I was old,

and still not near death.

I was old and full of memories

of the road past and still ahead;

of life lived and yet to come.

And there

upon the bridge a great conjoinment:

quantum states infinite, fragile;

the microwave shadows of beginning.

The man dipped slowly to the ground

as I turned to the waking state.

He knelt,

spitting,

raking mud from the earth

onto the tips of shining copper shells.

I felt the sting,

turning to find the face of a clock

where I supposed the man’s would be.

***

Your heart has told you many things,

not the least of which is this:

that hell is the repetition of time—

Look at this beggar, hanging himself again and again,

talking to himself all the while

—and heaven as well:

In your heart you claim to know

that the clock still secretly holds captive

that celestial bliss,

where the world is but a collection of afternoons

at the lake or the churchyard,

and the moments are linked and looped

into joy on the face of a child.

. . . Time

Your heart,

which itself

for now so faithfully beats the minute,

will fail in the shadow

of that light.

And you might laugh

that you ever supposed to see

Moses among the rushes

and then again

at the parting of the sea.

Did you really think to find Christ crucified

for all eternity?

has its beginning and its death . . .

Mile-markers confused

for the road.

***

None of this of course matters

while you are driving north on a Sunday night

heading for October,

the windows down for no more reason

than to know that indeed it is

growing colder, and to slowly inhale

the smell of the Great Lakes

even there,

when the rush of air, machinery and oil,

of factory slag and diesel fuel

is oddly pure, and makes this great now

you occupy

largely impenetrable

and lovely.

You will point out, of course,

that this is no salvation—

and rightly so.

You will laugh—

there, you have—

and remind me

(requiring reminding)

that this is what makes it matter the most:

these moments of distracted joy,

when attention has been drawn away

from the shadows behind the glass

by some friend’s joke

or request for information

from the conversation across the hall,

and then,

just as you are speaking,

in your peripheral half-sight

you sense naked movement in the great room

behind the glass:

All the eternal truth your heart will ever hold

captured

in the last light of a flashbulb’s death.

And that is all—a fleeting sense of clarity;

a dim aurora

faintly stitched across your life.

***

Yes, the stars are resplendent tonight,

and yes, I have been looking all my life

for one single unifying proof.

But defending a negative is suicide—

as countless suicide notes would say—

and I cannot provide what my own mind requires.

It is easy for you to suppose, upon viewing the stars,

that because at this moment you do not care one way or another,

the question need not be settled all at once, if at all.

And still, I say, there is this troubling set of minutes that haunt

the thoughts that truly do not matter,

which linger at the edges of the day;

there is this memory of perfect, trusting knowledge—

remembered as clear and unquestionable,

and devilishly ungraspable now—

that kept me, I believe, physically warm

when I was a child.

And now I have rendered you silent!

(Certainly, you still speak, laughing at me now;

but something larger and indelibly real in you

has locked onto these fragments of which I speak.)

Yes, your only point was that the stars are resplendent tonight.

No, they do not appear at all indifferent to the sky.

***

The hours are hay-filled

with talking endlessly;

cornhusking,

spouting and pouring out

about baggage and travel and signs.

Who is this single voice pulled out from the idle

crowd of chatter bursting the windows and the frame?

We have stuffed the moments full of speed and straw,

hurrying the days away through the gates.

You turned to me in a moment of social pause

not merely to glance up at the drapes or the balls of dust

in the corners near the ceiling, but to lean in

near my drowning ear and ask, delicately,

“Who is it that sits in the corner

that way

not speaking,

his knees drawn up to his chin,

looking at no single person and still me,

directly, when my sight cares to wander that way?

Who is it that sits in the corner

as if there is no conversation,

no annoying glint of serrated half-light

battering the window and the eyes?”

I suspected I might answer you,

and then you moved away, sucked back into the

maddening churn.

I suspected I might answer you,

but there were no words in my cringing face

to race out to meet you, after all;

to fall away from the moments to say

that we were not occupying the same instant

just then,

and there was no man, distracted, intent

or otherwise in the corner,

but a tiger—

the same tiger—

pacing circles

and eyeing the crowd.

The years burn away like parched fields of hay.

You have found swaying saw-grass

where I have stared hours at seraphs’ great wings.

***

All of these things have occurred to me

as though laid out upon a table:

The bridge in Mackinac;

the span in the desert;

the clock-faced man;

the graves by the sea.

All of this occurred to me in time.

And I suppose, in truth it has occurred within

that very moment when first I

leaned close to the windows in winter as a child.

Somewhere all of these met in us,

and we were haunted

by amorphous collections of light and shadow

groaning outside the door of our dreams

and our incidental speech.

You know, if you take a moment to,

the way the seconds have piled up

to bring us here to our valley;

the echoes of monks’ feet shuffling over stone,

the creak of rough-hewn wood against the sea,

the bristling scratch of pen against the parchment,

and the unheard sound of countless crumbling cities

have conspired to place us here,

silent and staring through the open chasm of a tire swing

or kitchen window

or coffee mug

past the beginning of all things;

past the beginning of the first, perfect language

to the bright nimbus of the first, perfect word.

This is the substance of proof that stands outside

the world—

that stands outside the golden frames our ages have built.

Renaissance after renaissance collide and die at our feet,

begin and halt continually at the wall of today,

this page,

this word.

***

Look, this is the last of it.

I have stood in this place and that,

and still not every place.

I have stood here and longed for

that place I left behind.

I have returned to that place,

and turned once again to some other place.

I have known only one station in the great

river of time,

and the smaller times within it.

I have longed for times my eyes

found more pleasing,

only to find my eyes failing, and untrustworthy.

Look, this is the last of it.

The world is a belly full of ghosts,

and every life its own world,

built on the beach-sand

of that life’s eyes.

I have felt the shifting sway in

re-read books

and crumbling, revisited neighborhoods and homes.

This is no single breath

given once,

as cold and as solid

as place.

Our very lungs refuse the notion.

And so this longing remains,

to return to places never seen;

never occupied;

never left.

This fervor is

whispered between lines of gravestones

near the sea,

between lines scratched in the

face of the clock and the compass.

Heaven is unhinged there—there—from the frame of the world.

Look, this is the last of it,

when the days grow dim

and the grasshopper

drags himself along,

and we feel on our faces

the breeze of spirits

and cherubim passing.

Every moment

in every lifetime of moments

is the moment before the last.