Indian Summer

November bore a balmy morn

after a week of frost

and recalled September’s golden girl

we’d given up for lost.

Nights grow long, yet chill relents,

though nature’s half undressed.

Abuela in a tattered gown,

hair a graying mess.

Winter is a callous aunt,

Summer her glowering son.

But in Autumn’s muted madras,

a kind of sweetness comes

amid the wreck of bloodied leaves

and contraction of the days.

She lies with me a moment

and I pretend that she might stay. 

Commuting with Collins

What I love about weekday mornings,

especially one of those spring days

when a few clouds float with hidden purpose

behind the brown sign with sans serif letters that proclaims, “Shady Grove,”

is the way one, wrapped inside the air-conditioned cocoon of the subway,

can disappear into a volume for forty-two perfect minutes.

And if that volume is, say,

A slim new book of poetry by Billy Collins,

(Random House trade paper $13.95),

a tiny museum whose canvases are pages and brushstrokes words,

then the world does not so much recede as transform.

Onto this world, I look from behind the vibrating plexy window

at the silent, blinking horses standing in the yard

and sit with a cup of coffee, a cigarette,

a little something going in the noisy old typewriter.

Then the chimes, an indication that the doors are closing,

a cold blue snap into autumn and the car, an expanse of white ink

disappears into the dark tunnel coiling away and down.

Lighthouse

Empire State Building, February 1980

A winter night at the top of the world.

A young woman stands bathed in sodium.

Illuminated by the floods,

Her eyes burn with disquiet.

At this hour the asphalt canals far below are deserted.

The few moving ships are silent as they roll to the dark sea.

She faces south looking toward the two towers at the harbor’s edge,

Their destruction still two decades away.

What stairway can carry us inside her?

Waves spray through her as she gazes at the shoals,

Buildings sparkle like a rocky coast in the moonlight.

Separating an ocean of light from the ocean of darkness.

Dugit Beach

A humid night in June and the city on the opposite shore

is made more distant in a haze of undelivered redemption.

The silver sun-coin, sinks behind a mountain towering above the Kinneret

where a young woman walks barefoot along the water’s edge.

All of the sins of our humanity, the sins of a year, of a decade, of a lifetime,

wash upon the shore in gentle ripples like smoke from an alter

rising to the soon black heavens.

Jupiter climbs, large and creamy, a weary god, who has all but forgotten
his chosen people and what exactly he chose them for.

The lake is fed by the waters of the Dan sweet and clear
and the murky Jordan neither chilly nor cold.  It is not enough.

Each year it sinks lower until one day

the salt waters will bubble up from the depths.

Galilee will become a true sea.

The murmurs of pilgrims, seekers, revelers, and madmen

float through the darkling twilight. Tiberius begins sparkling
like a rhinestone brooch. The young woman turns toward the city
and setting out upon the night water, begins her long journey to the cross.

The Silver Sun-Coin Sets at Dugit Beach on the Kinneret (Sea of Galilee) in Israel

For My Poetry Teacher Having Lunch on Tuesday with Mary Oliver

When you see Mary Oliver please tell her …

Well, it’s just that there is a fox

that lives on Ridge Road and once in a while

when I am running on winter mornings

when the sky is still night,

I see it dash across the silvery patch

where the gavel path runs

down to the abandoned farmhouse in the Casey field.

You might mention that

we also have a pond. I think of it often

but rarely see it. The town always changes

the combination. The fence keeps out the deer and me

but not the teens from the apartments behind.

They cut the chain link and slip in,

drinking beer and making love in the darkness.

In the morning their empties float in the green water.

I saw a black bear just once.

It was outside a lean-to in the Smokey Mountains.

I guess it will be twenty-five years this June.

She appeared in the woods

while I was fetching water at the spring

and climbed a tree digging her claws into the bark,

paw over paw, going straight up.

Her two cubs and I watched from below.

Barbara gave me Evidence this year

for my birthday, which fell on Yom Kippur.

I hid it inside my siddur on that holiest of days

and read “Broken, Unbroken,”

while the congregation symbolically beat its chest

and confessed to the sin of not seeing god in a neighbor’s face.

“A meaningful fast,” we told each other, “A sweet year.”

On second thought,

just tell her that I am starting to understand

I don’t have to be good. Tell her this year

the rhododendrons finally seem to be getting enough water.

Maybe let her know that in addition to announcing my place

in the family of things, it would be helpful if the wild geese

would also suggest where to place the line breaks in my poems.

Tell Mary Oliver I wrote this for her.