The Girl in the Yellow Raincoat
waits on the sidewalk outside
my window. The flower in her hair
is wet. She stands very still
her eyes focused upward on some
object I cannot see. She does not
move, but she smiles . . . slightly.
Perhaps she plays the cello
and she is humming Bartok silently
making the bow ripple with her tongue
against her teeth. Or, maybe, she waits
for a bus to take her to her lover.
Or she has read a letter from Paris
or Istanbul and she smells coffee
and chestnuts steam roasted and she
hears in the cobbled streets the cries
of vendors under the aged curves
of bridges. Perhaps she is just a girl
standing in the rain by a stone bench
in the early morning while the
street shines. It is nothing–you argue.
Then why do I weep, and why are there
splinters in my palms, and why do I
stand here, long, long, after she is gone?
– from The Girl in the Yellow Raincoat
A Small Thing Like A Breath
For James and Robert
How cheap words are. How easy to say,
\”I love you,\” knowing not even the surface
of the word. How easy to say, \”I\’d die for you,\”
knowing not even the icy edge of death, not even
his outer garments.
Then you bear a child. You carry a life
in the darkness of your womb for nine uneasy
months. The child descends, bumping the fragile
edges of its unformed skull against the walls
of your pelvic bone. He enters the world wailing.
For a time the machines help him breathe.
You cannot hold him because of the wires,
the sensors which monitor each vital function
and so you sit by his side and give him your
finger to hold, and you watch his tiny,
perfectly formed nails curl around you
and after many hours you are still not tired,
not finished marveling at the wonder you have
created and you know that you could, indeed
would die for this son, this glorious, heartbreaking,
selfish, beautiful son.
And every night you continue
to marvel, week after week, month after month.
Every night before sleep you tiptoe into his room
and listen to each small breath and watch the way
he seems to smile and how his eyelashes curl upward.
And later you will keep pictures, you will mark
his first step and the awkward, rounded shapes
of his first letters. You will shout with joy
for his first line drive and cry for the pink
cotton sheep he makes in Sunday school on Easter.
And when he hurts you will know the very marrow
of love, how pain for his pain takes you
in its arms and grips like icy night. Then,
when you speak of love and death, you will do so
not lightly, but with bowed head and hushed respect
for a small thing like a breath.
– from A Small Thing Like A Breath
Genesis
For Stephen and Katy
The swinging Lord, that master maker
of cool chords, shifted in his empty
heaven and said, \”I need me some music,\”
So the sky was full of music
and he declared that it was good
And then the equally androgynous Lord
said to herself, I need some light
to fill the fragrant fingers of the night
So the waters shone with light
and she declared that it was good
And when the light and the music played
together the stars wept for the beauty of it
And the swinging, singing Lord said
I need me some people to praise
this thing that I have made
The Lord thought long and long about what
sort of people might be the purest praisers,
what sort of people might truly see the light
And he made man, with his cunning brain,
and he made the zebras and the elk
and the swift running antelope for man
to wonder at. And she made woman with her
imagining mind and her long, limber dancing
legs and her eyes that saw the color in the light
And when the man and woman had been crafted
The Lord declared that it was good
Then the man heard the light in the woman\’s eyes
And the woman saw the music in the man\’s mind
And the music was the silky manes of violins
And the light was like the laughter of clarinets
and the glitter of guitars. And the man and the
woman moved to the measure of the music and swayed
to the gold and amber brilliance of the light.
And they knew that the sound was neither his nor hers
nor like anything that ever was before.
And the Lord saw what they had made
And behold it was very good
– from The Search For Wonder in the Cradle of the World
The Man Who Loved Animals
July Fourth, early evening, family
and friends gathered, sun setting, fireworks
an hour away, the dog not in his
accustomed place beneath their feet. They find
him in the woods, half buried, surely gone
to die.
Surprisingly the doctor\’s office answers.
A young vet sewing up a cat says, Bring
him in, and all of them carry the dying
dog to the waiting van. The doctor
operates at once, and the dog lives
for five more years.
Now, another July morning, Southern sky
hazy blue, the doctor drives to work, son
and heir in his infant chair, facing backwards
as the law prescribes. In his mind he drops
the baby at the sitter, then drives to work,
his brain churning with the day\’s events:
surgery on an old dog\’s eye, an evening
meeting at the Y.
The car bakes all day in the summer sun.
At five he leaves to retrieve his son.
The boy, he\’s sure, has played all day,
napped and sucked the bottle willingly
from the woman\’s careful hands. He finds
the child silent as a doll.
Over and over his broken heart replays
the morning\’s ride. He knows he dropped
the baby off.
So what can we say
Of this man who loves the red ears of foxes,
the padded paws of long-legged dogs,
and the soft fingers of his infant son?
That God loved him, loves him still, even after
he has lost all hope of love that light creeps in
after darkness even when we think
it never can. I know nothing about walking
into light, not even how to take the first step.
But the god who numbers the small bones
in the sparrow\’s wing can take the fingers
and the light and shape them into something new.
This I know and he, I think, knows too.
– from The Man Who