Rush Hour

As another day unwinds

the tic-toc-tic of traffic

lights paces bright-eyed

vehicles through an intersection

so they won't collide.

The pavement is still wet, but the sun

is coming out and this upbeat mood may stick.

All over the city work grinds

to a halt of one kind or another. The shadows

of buildings fill the street

like lovers lying back onto sheets, woes

dashed. Hopes pile

up in new directions. Horns bleet

their jubilation for the rank and file.

Burial Grounds

In the morning we took a walk along the shore;
hoar frost covered the sand; I expected it to make
walking easier, but it wasn’t, and when the ice
was erased by the onrushing foam I understood why.
We marched north, and then we marched south,
until a freshwater stream flowing into
the welcoming tide stopped the trail we made of time.
Ten feet from an eagle perched on a giant stump,
we snapped pictures that made it look light
on our shoulders, and then watched it soar the length
of our march with just a single stroke of its wings.
Back in the cabin you buried yourself in a warm bath,
while I sat and stared at the burial grounds off shore,
listening to ice break from the gutters, and fall.

Time Is An Ocean

On our walk from road to shore, I tried to revisit
arguments not worth remembering, and the wind
outside the woods only emphasized the silence
growing within. Naturally I thought of other beaches,
other loves. What good are they to me now?
What good those distant shores? Marriages may seem
fruitless, or futile; how can the divorces that follow
be any more so? You can spot the old growth
by the twisted shapes centuries have made of them,
and the moss that must keep those shapes warm.
Later, we put ourselves to bed with a bottle of Gallo,
and come morning the Gideon’s Bible was a blur.
It’s impossible to live by scripture without failing,
while the sea changes constantly, and never at all.

Nabokov’s Epistemology

For Aquinas, faith is a form of knowledge;
for Kierkegaard they're opposed, and the difference
amounts to a different appreciation of the natural
world. Regarding the last, consider Nabokov’s answer:
when asked whether he believed in God, he responded,
I know more than I can express in words,
and the little I can express would not have been expressed,
had I not known more, leaving the reader to wonder
what else he knew. It may well have something to do
with his experience in the zoological museum,
studying butterflies. Now imagine the man on a mountain,
running with his net, chasing a nymphet: the realization
of beauty is pinned to our understanding of mortality;
our understanding of mortality to something else besides.

The Origin of Mythology

Like a dream
left lying in bed,
or the drop of blood
that turned an ocean red,
Jesus healed the blind with mud,
from which he'd made sparrows, it would seem.

A Fib

The rhythm of this heart,
like rainfall, rapid and random,
is calmed by digitalis,
a drug derived from poisonous plants
with names like Foxglove and Monk’s Hood.
Names less taxing than our medical Latin,
but with the same truth:
one in being, won by word,
whether stepping out of a thimble flower
or fabricated in a pharmaceutical lab.
With a flash of her tail
the fox disappears into a thicket,
tongue of flame for an instant
before the empty rustle of leaves.
The monk pulls back his hood
and vanishes behind columns of stone
and the silence filling a cathedral.
The pharmacist counts out pills
with each finger push.
I leave with the medicine in hand,
the labeled bottle like a burning bush.

The Forest at Twilight

Not on the last day
but half way through Holy Week
came the moment

for which I’d been waiting
such a long time. You were there
with the dog (which I hadn’t expected),

and we found ourselves just a little lost
in the midst of a beautiful forest.
There was a slight drizzle

falling through the firs overhead.
The sun was setting
in a sky we couldn’t see.

Dusk came and enveloped
the woods in a silent hush,
as if ash had been dropped

from the trees. The hound,
ever eager, now seems at once
ahead, between, and behind

both you and me amidst the fronds,
a light rain, and the earth underneath,
walking together on the winding path.