close your eyes in the name
of attentiveness. In daylight,
there are birds, and for some reason
the wind too is always awake,
delivering weather or dust.
At night, you concentrate,
your listening is enhanced,
and sooner or later you will hear
a scale of bark let loose from a tree
or a needle tick from limb to limb
on its enormous journey to the earth.
And sometimes, having resumed
your walk, you will stop at the top
of the ridge above your house.
Its window lights will illumine the ground
around it, and you will listen again
and hear the faint hum of it—
the buzz of its lightbulbs, the industry
of its clocks. And sometimes
you will approach it as would a thief
and peer through the windows,
in order that you might covet,
being part of the world’s greater silence,
everything that is already yours.
CALENDAR
I wish the month had one more day, or even two,
or that, in truth, I might live it again, if only
so that Lola might be with me a little while longer.
Not that the month has been anything special
in regards to her. Most of it I spent
away, and even the time with her,
in the light of her devastating, sultry gaze,
the fabulous black teddy, the sheer pink
negligee, the one visible garter snap,
the black hose, the carmine garter belt itself,
and the high-heeled pink mules, to say nothing
of the way she is seated on the golden
sheen of the love seat, or the way the right
cup of the teddy creates the most perfect
ripple of flesh at the side of the breast
it lifts just enough to cast a slender shadow
between it and the other one, nor even
the way her left leg is tucked under the right
thigh or the way she holds the heel of that mule
in her right hand as though bracing herself
against herself. Even in all this glory,
the time I spent with her consisted of nothing
more than the occasional glance
until today. Tomorrow I’ll move on
to the beauty of next month, which, like every one
but this one, is nameless in a special way.
Four weeks ago, Firebelle; tomorrow, A Warm Welcome.
But today, dark already at four-thirty in the afternoon,
a snowstorm blowing in, it is Wednesday,
the thirtieth of Lola, 2011.
THE SCHOLAR
We were to know we would never know
as much about it as he did. He knew
we didn’t care and believed his knowing
was evidence. He was a scholar,
a critic, a wielder of wit for it,
its minutiae and mysteries,
which for him were no mystery at all.
Machinery, maybe. Cogs and pistons,
the pinioned heart in the heat of it.
Someone asked about love, the fool.
Our backs ached. The sun was relentless.
He leaned on his hoe as though
it were a podium, drew a kerchief
from his pocket and wiped his face.
He pointed at the sky, where a hawk hovered,
awaiting the mouse that would bolt
from our work. One mouse was just
like another, and we were more or less
the same, except for what we’d never know,
which we knew, even without his saying so.
ANNA KARENINA
The inquisitive look on the dog’s face
makes me happy, suggesting not only her intelligence
but my own, for having such a intelligent dog
in the first place. Although what it is
she wonders about I do not know. Seated in my chair,
a book in my lap, I looked up and there she was,
regarding me, as though she wondered
what this book from the library, so redolent
of others like myself, might offer me
that she herself could not. But now she seems
less inquisitive than wry, as though the compendium
of sense I find my way through, she, via the scents
only she is capable of apprehending, knows. Perhaps
someone shed a tear on a page I am yet to reach,
someone freshly washed, although the robe
she wore was not and gave traces of someone else,
someone she, the weeping woman, also sensed
in its folds, which the dog reads just as I read
the words, at this point in the volume,
not the sort anyone would cry over.
Do you want out? I ask her, and walk to the door
and open it. But she only looks up at
of attentiveness. In daylight,
there are birds, and for some reason
the wind too is always awake,
delivering weather or dust.
At night, you concentrate,
your listening is enhanced,
and sooner or later you will hear
a scale of bark let loose from a tree
or a needle tick from limb to limb
on its enormous journey to the earth.
And sometimes, having resumed
your walk, you will stop at the top
of the ridge above your house.
Its window lights will illumine the ground
around it, and you will listen again
and hear the faint hum of it—
the buzz of its lightbulbs, the industry
of its clocks. And sometimes
you will approach it as would a thief
and peer through the windows,
in order that you might covet,
being part of the world’s greater silence,
everything that is already yours.
CALENDAR
I wish the month had one more day, or even two,
or that, in truth, I might live it again, if only
so that Lola might be with me a little while longer.
Not that the month has been anything special
in regards to her. Most of it I spent
away, and even the time with her,
in the light of her devastating, sultry gaze,
the fabulous black teddy, the sheer pink
negligee, the one visible garter snap,
the black hose, the carmine garter belt itself,
and the high-heeled pink mules, to say nothing
of the way she is seated on the golden
sheen of the love seat, or the way the right
cup of the teddy creates the most perfect
ripple of flesh at the side of the breast
it lifts just enough to cast a slender shadow
between it and the other one, nor even
the way her left leg is tucked under the right
thigh or the way she holds the heel of that mule
in her right hand as though bracing herself
against herself. Even in all this glory,
the time I spent with her consisted of nothing
more than the occasional glance
until today. Tomorrow I’ll move on
to the beauty of next month, which, like every one
but this one, is nameless in a special way.
Four weeks ago, Firebelle; tomorrow, A Warm Welcome.
But today, dark already at four-thirty in the afternoon,
a snowstorm blowing in, it is Wednesday,
the thirtieth of Lola, 2011.
THE SCHOLAR
We were to know we would never know
as much about it as he did. He knew
we didn’t care and believed his knowing
was evidence. He was a scholar,
a critic, a wielder of wit for it,
its minutiae and mysteries,
which for him were no mystery at all.
Machinery, maybe. Cogs and pistons,
the pinioned heart in the heat of it.
Someone asked about love, the fool.
Our backs ached. The sun was relentless.
He leaned on his hoe as though
it were a podium, drew a kerchief
from his pocket and wiped his face.
He pointed at the sky, where a hawk hovered,
awaiting the mouse that would bolt
from our work. One mouse was just
like another, and we were more or less
the same, except for what we’d never know,
which we knew, even without his saying so.
ANNA KARENINA
The inquisitive look on the dog’s face
makes me happy, suggesting not only her intelligence
but my own, for having such a intelligent dog
in the first place. Although what it is
she wonders about I do not know. Seated in my chair,
a book in my lap, I looked up and there she was,
regarding me, as though she wondered
what this book from the library, so redolent
of others like myself, might offer me
that she herself could not. But now she seems
less inquisitive than wry, as though the compendium
of sense I find my way through, she, via the scents
only she is capable of apprehending, knows. Perhaps
someone shed a tear on a page I am yet to reach,
someone freshly washed, although the robe
she wore was not and gave traces of someone else,
someone she, the weeping woman, also sensed
in its folds, which the dog reads just as I read
the words, at this point in the volume,
not the sort anyone would cry over.
Do you want out? I ask her, and walk to the door
and open it. But she only looks up at
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