Night Gym

          The gym is closed, locked

     for the night.  Through

     the windows, a quiet

     beam from the street lights

     lies across center court.

     The darkness wraps itself

     around the trophies, lies

     softly on the Coach's desk,

     settles in the corners.

     A few mice scratch under

     the stands, at the door

     of the concession booth.

     The night wind rattles

     the glass in the front doors.

     The furnace, reliable

     as grace, sends its steady

     warmth through the rafters,

     under the bleachers, down

     the halls, into the offices

     and locker rooms.  Outside,

     the snow falls, swirls, piles

     up against the entrance.

Rainbow

           “There is no precise date at which mythology

      gave way to science.”

                                --Carl B. Boyer, The Rainbow: From

      Myth to Mathematics

So science is the bully on the playground,

the guy who says Babe Ruth was just

a drunk, the kid who rolls his eyes

the day the trees all bud. You know elves

live under your porch, that God loves

puppets, that the wind comes from a witch's

cave, and birds sing just to sing.  What if

Wordsworth, strolling along the lakes,

looked up, took out his pen and speculated

how the color came from light refracted

through the drops of rain that formed

around some dust? And what if Noah, crazed

with the smell of dung, the impatience of every

creature on the earth, what if this wild builder

of faith, when he saw that covenant of color

draping over his mad zoo, had tried to tabulate

the cubits in the rainbow's length, forgetting

about the dove, the olive branch, dry land?

And what do we make of Philip, Plato's less-  

than-certain pal? He scribbled in his notebook

that the rainbow wasn't stable after all; it moved

as the observer moved and somewhere

over the rainbow was farther away

than any bird could ever fly.

So if science is uncertain

as tomorrow's weather, I think I'll say

the rainbow, like most everything—this

poem, elephants, the hurricane along

the Georgia coast, my daughter's scribbled

chalk across the sidewalk—is not just one more

worn, anonymous effect in cause's long and

flagrant history. I'll say the rainbow simply

comes. Light may bend, reflect, refract,

but why then color? Why Mozart

from a catgut string?  And why this morning,

when I saw that we were out of coffee,

did I look up and see you in the garden,

staking our tomatoes in the rain?

The Dry Wallers Listen to Sinatra While They Work

This morning, my mother, here

for the holidays, is washing

the breakfast dishes, when Al, wiry,

coated with dry wall dust takes

her hand and says, “I bet you loved

Sinatra. Dance?” The acrid smell

of plaster floats through the room.

Frank is singing, “All or nothing

at all,” and Al leads my mother

under the spinning ballroom lights

across the new sub-floor. He

is smiling. She is looking over

his shoulder. The other guys

turn off their sanders. Al

and my mother move through

the dust, two kids back

together after the war. Sinatra

holds his last note. “It's been

seven years since I danced,”

my mother says. “Then

it was in the kitchen, too.”

Al smiles again, says,

“C'mon then, Sweetheart!”

biting off his words like the ends

of the good cigars he carries

in his pocket. Sinatra's singing

“My Funny Valentine” and

my mother lays her hand in Al's.

They dance again, she looking

away when she catches my eye,

Al leading her back

across the layers of dust.

At Fifty

Coach hurls the ball against the garage door,

grabs it on the rebound. He's missed ten

in a row. He steps to the line, bounces

the ball twice, hard, and the fans from

thirty years ago send their hopes across

their weary lungs. He listens to the hush

of the home crowd while the taunts

of those from out of town float through

the rafters down across the backboard,

spinning around and around the rim.

He slams the ball one more time, feels

the leather, eyes the hoop, shoots.

The ball caroms off the back of the rim, rolls

across the driveway into the herb garden

his wife planted the year they found this house.

Once he could drop nine out of ten

from the line, hit half his jump shots

from twenty feet.  Coach sits down at

the top of the key, stares, sees himself

bringing it up against the press, faking,

shaking his shoulders, stutter stepping, shifting

the ball left hand to right, then back, then up,

his legs exploding, his wrist firing, the ball

looping up, down, through the hoop, making

the net shimmer, the crowd roar.  He gets up,

goes over to the garden, reaches for the ball,

stops and pulls some weeds growing through

the oregano, basil, sage, and thyme.

The History of the Pencil

Even as you sit staring at the light

on the new computer that came with speakers

and disks that hold golf games, sound tracks

from the movies of the forties and a way to rhyme

every word except those stubborn loners silver,

purple, and orange, you have to wonder

how this most elemental of juxtapositions,

this marriage that few families would allow,

this wedding of wood and lead wandered

into some pause in the daydreams

of whom. Even Thoreau, that son

of the pencil-making family who recorded

every move of a leaf, who listed each essential

object for a twelve day trek into the woods

of Maine: “Matches; soap, two pieces; old

newspapers, three; and blanket, seven feet long,”

neglected to note his pencil. Imagine being held

by the hand of the keeper of Walden

as he, in all his assured solitude, attended

to everything in his burrowing but you,

the scribbler's one essential companion.

Wouldn't you feel much like the friend

who has been there all along, who leaves

quietly out the back door when the famous

come to call, or the good dog who stays

loyal day after abandoned day, or the name,

changed to something more alluring,  

that sits and wonders why you are walking away?

“I am a pencil,” said Toulouse-Lautrec

to one of the rouged and rowdy-legged dancers

he let become a gray line kicking high

over his lonely head in the dance hall.

Even Leonardo whose mind would never let

anything escape from the possibility of being better,

wrote those mad, mirror-written obsessions,

his maimed right hand dangling

like a sash, and sketched his own hand

sketching, without ever thinking

that the tedious brush could give way

to something humbler, more subservient.

Did it never enter the mind of some poor

hunter-gatherer, who surely heard the tunes

of the very beasts and berries he searched for,

“I'd like to keep what I'll likely forget. Maybe

if I. . .” Was it there that his mind opened

into the first existential blank? And when

he told her and all his cave companions

what he'd like to be able to do, did they each

just nod and go back to picking out

what had gathered in their hair throughout the day?

So now, as you sit stunned at the mere accumulation

of words filed, edited, viewed, inserted,

formatted, spun into web sites, downloaded

and upgraded into numbers nothing but infinity

seems able to record, even now

on some desk, maybe yours, in an old jelly jar,

or a ceramic elephant with a hole in its back

that your niece in third grade gave you for Christmas,

or in a German beer stein or hand-painted, wooden

Chinese calligrapher's pen holder, sprouts a fistful

of pencils, Roethke's preservers of dolor, each one waiting

as they always have, to lie like a faithful love

between your thumb and finger, to let your words

be the only ones they will ever know

even as they give themselves to the alchemy

of everything, becoming empty phrases,

an X to mark the spot, reminders

to pick up bread and coffee, maybe a note

written to a friend whose dog has died.

Suite for the Turning Year

                       I  

Sometimes when the dogs are asleep,

and the whole world seems quietly

poised between green and brown,

when everything is lascivious with

leaves—the ground, the porch floor,

the holly bushes, even a few last trees--

you can see a glimpse of the way

the clapboard house was set within

this woods, almost see them nailing

the sills under the windows and

carrying in the kindling. The air

sifts across your forehead, and you

look up, hearing the chill jabber

of the chickadees, the quick

scattering of chipmunks, and

in the anonymous distance,

the disappearance of the sound

of children or was it a car? There

is no need for a letter in the mail,

no thought of putting away

the pots of yellowed impatiens.

Just this little time and

perhaps, a little more.

                          II

Feeling this way in the afternoon.

Not because it's November. The burnished

landscape lends an invitation to sit,

a blanket across the knees that once bent

and knelt to plant a hundred bulbs,

pull a thousand weeds. This month's

brown cold is welcome. Within the calm,

there is no guilty need to do, no frantic

thought that one had better take advantage

of the long day's light. Oh, the dogs still

need their walk. And there are dishes. But

we can listen to the radio, can watch the slow

breathing of the cats, look for this year's

yearlings as they cross the hill behind the house.

Still the world must make space for us  

to sit, walk, sleep, give up itself to give us

room. Later this afternoon, after I build

a fire, we'll pull down our book of maps,

imagine our breath is giving something back,

alchemizing oxygen into gratitude even though

we are an inconvenience in the world.

          III

The sun beats down

somewhere else

and the moon is lower

than the tops of the trees.

The cats come back from

their prowl and curl up

in front of the back door.

Coming up the street,

the headlights on the night

shift worker's car turn

into his driveway. We

can hear the refrigerator,

the pump in the basement,

the fan in the bedroom

upstairs. If there are

ghosts, they have only

our silence and the last

of the moon's borrowed light.

                IV

Light lies on the oriole's nest,

fallen empty in the euonymus.

Strands of lobelia hang over the edges

of the chipped terra cotta pots

on the back step. There's an old

novel on the kitchen table, one cat

asleep under the hanging basket.

On the porch a watering can

is giving in to rust. The cracked pink

flamingo stands bent on its iron legs.

                  V

Two days of soft snow lie

under the moon's stolen light.  

It's early winter. Now a quiet

accumulation of cold comes

in its slow way. I wait

for stillness, its stay. Why

think of winter in winter?

Maybe to follow my father

through the old grass into

the deer's long walk across the snow.

               VI

Sometimes when the snow

is nearly deep enough

to keep us home, we stay

in anyway, carry in kindling,

build a fire, unfold blankets,

and stack the books we open

now and then. Next to us

we set a pot of coffee, add

a log when we must. Wind

passes, whirling little lifts

of snow against the window.

The dogs sleep as if we're gone.

Others have to leave. We know.

The mail will arrive at noon,

the newspaper by evening.

It won't matter as much.

After sleep, there will be ashes

under the grate, a little less

wood to burn, more or not

as much snow. We may

play some Lester Young

and Etta James, let his sax and

her voice smolder in the coals.

               VII

How good it is to be in here,

on the couch, the dogs asleep

against the pillows at the ends

as if we are safe in the great

Kingdom of Rain. Death

with its lisping end rhymes

stands under an umbrella.

The rain against the windows

is a language, its assonance

an uninvited solace. Cold

will come again. We can't

move south. We have sweaters.

We depend on a shovel

and the neighbor's plow.

We depend on music, on

knowing we no longer

need to say we love one

another. Love is Emanuel.

This rain. The leaves.

This music on the radio

is music on the radio.

The dogs sleep with

their names. These leaves,

this music, this rain.