Wednesday, May 28, 2008

From ICU, Mercy Hospital, one week after the collapse of I-35 Mississippi Bridge

We stand on the hard hospital floor around your bed
In this room segmented by steel and concrete
And we wonder how the span of our fate can be
Less tenuous than the bridge we crossed daily
Thin and strong running along the line that draws
Bank to bank like a river with no bed

Like a river with no bed these thoughts
Fall
Out onto the concrete, the sound of your heart monitor
Like Mississippi’s whisper
When the stones were falling from their line, forgotten line
We wonder how the span of our own fate can be forgotten
As if bank to bank we clasped arms across your bed
And let no tears drop to salt these pall trusses

Like a broken bridge you lie
Your arm draped jagged down the starched linen,
Eyes clouded like submerged car windows
Mouth half-open. we look down at you like reporters
Our talking jostled as hand-held camcorders' playback
We simply must be near you, we interview
The nurse, the dietary aide, the phlebotomist,
The anesthetist who pressed your hand and commanded “move
Your fingers.”

Please, reach out again to grasp bank to solid bank
Rise up from the river, from this bed white as fate
You look unnatural there when you had such graceful lines.

Sunday, May 25, 2008

This in our image (this is our image?)

This is a song to you
like the tune streaming through
earphones, like your body moving silently
as a windblown blade. I write this to you
with my eyes closed and your eyes
closed

Like this bus like this train like this
bench
in imagist station of faces, petals
flowering dark faces
closed like the twine of images in holy metaphory
for this mystery, yourself an image
and myself falling petals
caught and flung from this black aspergillum
bough of poetry

But all the natural world will unfold
like the wind
moving silently
as your head nodding
as your lips around your song
blowing wordless notes--

not this note, wrangled
sweet and strange as saints'
faces in icon wrought,
but before and through the thought.

Monday, May 05, 2008

One for walking

We walked down to the river
spoke very little, the motion
of our breath like the wind rippling
the water—not the wind it was but the water
with its own mute vibrations calling
to the obscured sky

We have loved
each other for how long, the river runs on,
the sound of rocks and pebbles
tossed below its wind-blown skin
we have loved and will again
I silently vow that I would even walk alone--
I would walk here alone

knowing how the last light
as we turned for home
struck off your eyes like far golden windows
the water and I to each side taking
the chance to hold love's hues.

like water that dwells with the sky
we are too heavy long to fly
But let us walk, you and I, down, down, down
to the riverside.