A Rather Lovely Thing

Honored to be featured in this issue of Streetlight Magazine.

http://streetlightmag.com/in-this-issue/poetry-issue-no-5/

Does Leonard Cohen know?
We call upon him to scratchily explain
How exactly he learned of our singular pain.

Lenny, please. Again?
Aren’t you already out of amens?

To think we can save our sons from the wound when
it is both self-inflicted and a thing that we teach them.

Something creaked
Something shifted
Something fell
We start in the belly of night

For the first time today
I pinpoint my breath
It’s there at the end on my nose

There in the waiting

“We can never be with loss too long.”
– Spencer Reese, At Thomas Merton’s Grave

The planks and bricks rickety, low, so
Cal Cooley built that bridge for the local boys.
Part and parcel public works for his
brave little state of Vermont.
“1924″ chiseled in Gothic on that
white granite found deep under Bethel.
The floodwater of ’27 just a stain. How to measure the
other years? By cracks and the dignity of graffiti?
Even my days sag and run together, to know those before
like removing the spring’s daily trickle from Silver Lake.
When my forewaters spill in ’80, you’re old if you recall prior.
On some lost who-knows-when, Locust is dammed-up deep there
with mossy telephone poles,
the best swimming hole beneath. It’s a 20-foot drop and clear to the
bottom.
I’m 13 and dizzy on the rail. Some years you touch.
You learn to make your body sharp, muck the better of red welts and blue wails.
More cracks, which are just more cracks, but the graffiti more street.
When I climb up at 26, I shiver in advance and almost fall instead of
jump.
Strange that loss functions as ballast.
Duly sessile then, till I found my bride.
Then filled and fleet and the splash is back.
She wondered if my Nanne and Gov would be safe as
Irene blundered up the coast.
Hurricanes don’t hit Vermont!
Except in ’38, I see. Which is the same as never.
A photo kept in my wallet, count back from ten: that pool, that bend in Locust
before the road up to the old farm,
before the summer unwinds.
A “timeless” view, but of course, exactly time.
And now you really can’t get there from here,
not by bridge. And I won’t even recognize the vista. Just
this is the way it was when the water came rushing in.
Soon we are not with loss but of it.

“Oh moon, don’t cry for me,”
we would grandstand and clown for
Mr. MacDonald who didn’t like Wordsworth,
hated Tennyson.
Dying in snow and seven siblings, all that shit
The light brigade: sabered morons.
No deep lovely thoughts afterward,
because you are dead.
Life was the only thing worth living for.
He stood up with Blake for the chimney sweeps.

We read Catch-22.
And all about the flak,
ak-ak-ak-ak.
His romance was in living and
spitting truth.
We laughed about the lonely moons,
overly eager with simpering sympathy,
laughed about the tides of silvery seas
consumptive children and mossy graves,
chuckled over “the soul”.
Humanism is for high school and we loved him.

Twice 16 now, I am taking out the trash,
enmeshed in fleshy, itchy life.
The moon takes me aback in its
huge bright reality.
I would be no more startled to see my skull
bleached and burgeoned, grinning down.
Consider the moon,
the way of it is solitary and mournful.
The of what and how far aren’t real at all.
If the moon isn’t achingly, brightly alone,
if it doesn’t float just to stir me…
If you saw that moon, you’d see.
I want to cradle it,
to tell it that I’m OK.
And just to be lit up awhile.

I think it would be grand,
to write a poem about the moon,
and have someone think about it,
when they looked at the moon.
You know, one of those things you think of
out of nowhere.