4 Poems

In the Room of Past Light

First I notice the moth
in the housing of a halogen bulb—
the murky outline
no bigger than an infant’s earlobe
wings stiffened
having flown out all directions
tying an invisible thread into knots
above me.
Staring into the white glow
until what’s visible is not glass
and stucco ceiling, and I am no longer
in the garage,
but my parents car at twelve years old
near home on a beat-down highway
where overgrown fields wait untouched
and a barn, ashen and tilted with age,
hides a bush hog, still hooked
to a Massey-Ferguson tractor—smoke
battered boards left to rot
as if I could smell fire
consuming stockpiles of feed,
hay, and manure up through the rafters
years before. We pass the airfield running parallel
to the mountain, to the old hemlock
and oak forest. A junkyard walls one end
of the strip—swollen with hoodless cars,
yellow washing machines
spilling into the river.
It’s raining, the swales on either side of the road
are flooded. The distant trees
cut at the sky like a saw
deeper with each curve as I’m lulled
to sleep. Unable to recall those dreams,
only this flash of something so unimportant
long ago, still able to see my face
half-visible in the car window—
slumped against the door,
grown into solace.
Holding my eyes still against the land
like a prop in a scrolling portrait.
Passing lines of birds
resting in opposite directions
so real and perfect—almost.
Now, as if I’m coming upon the grain silo
as I did back then, wedged just outside of North Cove,
with no stoplight or post office in view—
noticing for the first time
how impossible its silver domes were
under the rise of a mountain ridge.
And thinking who would have bought those acres
of rhododendron and shade
and seen what work was capable of?
The rust-caked roof
and the empty hills, and corn
just in little stars like sparklers.
The dead moth
comes back into focus—
a breathless shell.
I pull the chain to the bulb—off and on,
it disappears
in sleeves of light
one dust-coated wing at a time.

Vitruvian Man

After the scans revealed
his bones phosphorescent
and the paperwork was signed
he slipped out of a hospital gown
and stood naked by his window to view
the fixed stars overhead. Thousands
of years earlier man worshiped
fire borrowed from these same stars.
He once stood in waist-high grass
to witness the second coming
of Hale-Bopp. He remembers the comet
in the sky for eighteen months
the span of two full term pregnancies—
those of his daughter:
one son dead weeks before birth.
The second born. Full
of the same blood which set
his bones in place and divided cells
into slots for eyes, a mouth.
The bag of intravenous fluid rattles
on a metal pole in a corner as a drip
flows back to his arm
along a clear tube. He doesn’t believe in spells
or magic circles, but traces the edge
of the moon with his finger—
tilts his head back to breathe.

Because My Heart Was a Blueprint

drawn by my father’s hand
there is an undoing working in my chest.
Sometimes I feel it
shuffle against the stillness of lying in bed
shirtless, and pressed to the wall,
a cold unlike any other.
Because each day I am further
from his voice, I hear him say:
“We used to be nothing—
a silence before starlight
rising in a soft music
like the sun, corniced
over the slanted tin-roof
of a barn at daybreak.
First, our souls were struck
like match-tips—the shape before fire
whispering out the first rosette of flame.”
Because I used to fit in his palm
because he’s nothing, because he’s ash—
I carry him under my fingernails.
Now, when I look at myself
I see his face—like watching film
develop in a dark room.
Today, because no one could bear to sleep
I tried to mimic his laugh. For months, nothing
about death felt real. Not its cool pattern—
delicate among something so different than itself
like a white leveret hidden in a field
sunken in snow.
Not the sudden confrontation of loss
like the break between antler and pedicle
on the skull of an elk.
Not anything final—
what the living try to make
of stone or language. Two years have passed.
Overnight, rain strays across the mountainside—
a eulogy for the gravel it floods down
further toward a pasture’s broken edge.
My father’s heart was all lightning
and blood at the end—
because it had tried and failed twice before
it took no chances. Fifty-eight years
of breath and time
strewn naked behind a couch
without a last word— with only the needlework of amber light
from across the street
freckled on his skin
and over dust— lost between the floorboards.

Poem Ending in Light Over Two Horses

Who cares what I have
to say of my father? Growing up
with nothing of my own
I would walk a loose gravel road
to watch two buckskin duns
fade into the last pools of day,
when the black of their manes
became slivers of night—
hooves dusting black-eyed Susans
as they walked between dried mud
and waist high meadow.
Down the hill, the town’s
Baptist church peered across a river.
The white letters of CALVARY
recognizable to the illiterate, the drunks
and addicts I would come to know.

For a while I believed
Jesus had been crucified in the same field
I found myself in so many times—
slanted, the upslope covered with milkweed
scattered with baskets of witch-hazel.
I couldn’t help watching
those animals
who also had nothing,
who smudged the earth
with delicate hooves.
Here I grew
apart from my father—
him living, always
in lonely houses. I would go
less to the pasture
coming home in time to set silverware
and finding my face stretched,
inverted in the bowls of soupspoons.

Once, lifting a porcelain rabbit
to wipe clean the kitchen table
feeling an old seam glued back together
where years ago, my father
threw it at my mother
and the ear broke off in one
solid piece—
only a teenager when I saw
how deep that break went, the first fissure
in my mother’s heart.

Had he not died,
one day I could have told him
of those nights returning from the countryside—
legs thin and thorn cut, left itchy and freckled with blood
thinking, as I went to bed
of those geldings—
happiness which then was the color of light
on their shoulders.