A Monk After Dark
One boot sags dumb like him in a corner.
He drops the other to the floor with a grimace.
He’s still devout. If his face contorts,
It’s from pain in both his shoulders. A nuisance,
Not metaphor. It’s the fruit of labor –
A day-long springtime dig in the garden:
Parsnips enough for the brothers, heaped pale
In the wheelbarrow, damnably old-fashioned.
He shouldn’t complain, but concedes he’s bored.
In a club a jazz man’s trombone rumbles,
A point guard throws a tricky pass
In a game, flesh flickers onscreen. For example.
Owls outside. Does he envy night-birds?
How might they profit him? He’s no psalmist.
He took his vows far later than most.
There were too many gawkers today on visits:
As they dawdled, he thought of a schoolmate’s smile,
Her “peasant” skirt, the glint of her teeth.
He kissed her once as they walked across
A late-autumn field of winter wheat.
For instance. Their words? He can’t remember.
Where might that decent girl be now?
He dreams of her as a visitor here:
In unsuitable shoes, she’d wend through rows
Of beets and splendid heads of cabbage.
She’d study the bees with a less studied eye,
The way they bob in morning’s first sun,
Their perfect bodies reflecting its light.
How strange, their tiny white larvae in May.
But to him, all this is completely familiar,
And familiar feels sometimes like an affront.
Tonight, as they do each night, owls yammer,
Over and over and over and over.
* * * * *
Haze
Purple finch, wild iris, hornbeam blossom,
red quartz boulder, oak-leaf. As I cook breakfast
this time, I note some things out our kitchen window
that I’ve taken for granted too long, and I’m ashamed.
I conjure up cliché to scold myself:
You have one life to live seems apropos.
I kill the heat. The bacon and eggs can wait.
I decide to take a languid tour of the house.
One of two living room windows looks downhill
on the little patch of playground that we fashioned
when all our kids were small. A puff of breeze
bends weeds and sets a swing in ghostly motion.
I open the door to the porch and gaze through screens,
which blur the pond and the beach we made back then,
overtaken since by mullein and vetch.
A snapping turtle slogs onto its sand
to leave frail eggs, though the day is raw
for June. We wear our sweaters, light a fire.
A haze of smoke, which in such chill should rise,
sheathes the lawn instead like gossamer.
* * * * *
The Poet’s Indolence
–on our 37th anniversary
The sun having stooped behind the ridge to the west,
the moths come forth: Rosy Maple, American Copper, Ambiguous.
The remnant glow backlights each one on the screen of the porch,
where, in the warmer months, the couple takes meals.
Slowly, their galaxy will reveal itself, ineffably.
He might be restless, but ease prevails.
He might be refining words. It’s what he does.
In earliest spring, he’d look for better, say, than melting.
The winter hardwoods would deserve more than naked.
In summer, he’d need to allow green frogs to do more than twang
in the one-acre marsh a few hundred yards to the north,
and bullfrog song would transcend mere croaking there.
Yes, all of them warrant more, but not on his account.
Not now. The forecast calls for storms tomorrow,
and they’ll have their splendors no doubt. Perhaps he’ll prospect again.
For now, it feels better to sit in silence with his best companion,
watching those pairs of delicate wings refract the ebbing day.