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The Magi

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 00:00:00 -0500

Christmas Eve, the Word made Flesh,
We put the baby in the manger,
But could not add them to the crèche”
They still had miles of doubt and danger.

They set out from the staircase landing,
Traveling lightly and untrammeled:
One was kneeling, one was standing,
And our favorite was cameled.

Past falling cards and other perils
They crossed the piano’s dark plateau
Where someone fumbled Christmas carols
And sang of silence, stars and snow.

They camped wherever they were able,
A potted fern for an oasis.
From shelf to windowsill to table,
Night by night, we’d change their places.

The thrill of our own gifts forgot,
No longer new, the batteries
Gone dead, at last they’d reach the spot,
One king already on his knees,

One kneeling, while the camel grunted”
Twelve whole days of Christmas hence”
To give what no child ever wanted:
Gold and myrrh and frankincense.

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For a Young Dancer on St. Patrick’s Day

Mon, 01 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0400

At six, her stance is
Like a professional’s—she waits her cue
Intensely and with no expression,
The youngest in the troupe of girls
Costumed alike in skirts that flare like bells
Embroidered with designs—
Abstracted tangled animals and geometric vines—
Drawn from the Book of Kells,
Hair done up in headdresses of artificial curls
To bounce in time to lively Irish dances,

But it’s the music of a Shaker hymn
When she takes her place
Alone on the plywood stage, candescent with such fierce
And concentrated joy
As no smile will pierce
And no trivial laughter can alloy,
Each swift and nimble limb
Inhabiting its quickness without haste,
As if she had only herself to please.
All gazes

Fix on her, not because,
Or not only because, she is a lovely, solemn elf,
Not that her eyes
Are just the shade of blue
Patterned on antique Delft
Or that cliché of cloudless skies
(Though bored through with the blackness of unfathomable Space),
And it is not her fearsome self-possession
Around her, tightly furled,

Rather the possession of her self
By a vaster power
Whose presence in this low room till this hour
Had been unknown to us
And momently amazes,
As the wide wind that breathes upon the world
Enlists the tossing of high-masted trees,
The bowing of the grass,
The shiver of a roadside flower,
So we may see it pass.

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After Sappho

Fri, 01 May 2009 00:00:00 -0400

Hesperus, you reunite
What dawn divides from one another”
The businessman and the suburb,
The couple and their chronic argument,
The toddler in daycare with his frazzled mother.

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For a Joint Fortieth Birthday

Sun, 01 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0500

for Barnaby

If we’re in the same boat, call it an ark:
For forty days and nights”about six weeks
Of thunder, water roar, and windy shrieks,
Of hiss, growl, moo, oink, trumpet, purr, and bark”
We’ve scanned a horizon on which none can mark
The scumble of an island’s mountain peaks,
And every night a springing of fresh leaks,
And every dawn a bailing out of dark.
Exciting, sure”since everything’s at sea,
Like youth, when all the ancient past is sunk
And future has no firm geography;
But there’s an end to every quarantine”
Rainbows, new cities to be peopled, wine
To be discovered yet, and Noah drunk.

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The Magi

Sat, 01 Dec 2007 00:00:00 -0500

Christmas Eve, the Word made Flesh,
We put the baby in the manger,
But could not add them to the crèche—
They still had miles of doubt and danger.

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Aegean Story

Sun, 01 May 2005 00:00:00 -0400

Briefly, newspapers recite
The facts about the fisherman
Who for two months, day and night,
Went out fishing for his son,

His only child, aged 23,
Who in a winter squall was drowned”
Washed overboard and out to sea”
And whose body was not found

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Lovejoy Street

Sun, 01 May 2005 00:00:00 -0400

The house where we were happy,
Perhaps it’s stranding still
On the wrong side of the railroad tracks
Half-way down the hill.

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