The Poems

The door stands open still —
the light that held your shape
has long since given up
the shape.

I have folded all your letters
into the drawer that sticks.
The house knows
what I will not say.

Outside, the elm is letting go
leaf by leaf, without ceremony.
Even it has learned
the practice of release.

And me?
Still standing at the sill,
watching the road that brought you
fill with ordinary rain.

All winter the house held its breath —
the pipes their cold opinions,
the windows their slow arithmetic
of frost and thaw.

I moved through its rooms
the way water moves through a locked room:
finding the seams,
the places where the air went slack.

By March the woodpile was almost done.
I had grown accustomed to the cold
the way one grows accustomed
to a particular kind of quiet.

The hedgerows are retracting their offers.
The light, which was so loose all summer,
has pulled itself together
into something more exact.

A heron on the far bank:
a sentence begun in one language
and ended in another,
still waiting for its verb.

The river makes its steady argument.
I have been here an hour already
and written nothing
that isn't about staying.

To translate is to carry a body across a river.
You will lose something in the current.
This is not failure —
this is the river doing its work.

The word for grief in one language
weighs more than in another.
The word for home
does not travel at all.

What arrives on the far bank
is something that has learned
a new relationship
with its own absence.

This is the art.
This is also the grief.

My grandmother spoke it like a room she still lived in —
the furniture arranged just so,
the window open the same inch
it was always open.

I have one word of it.
A word for a kind of silence
that has no equivalent
in any language I have learned since.

I use it sometimes when I am alone.
I use it the way one might lay flowers
at a grave
in a city one is only passing through.

Someone before me understood this line.
I know because they pressed too hard —
the pencil carrying its certainty
through to the next page.

Their handwriting is better than mine.
Their question marks more confident.
They wrote yes three times in a row
as if arguing with a wall.

I have read their marginalia
more carefully than the text itself.
This is perhaps
what the text intended.

The rock here is four hundred million years old
and doesn't mind.
It has watched continents make their mistakes
and learned to keep quiet about it.

The sea arrives every few seconds
with the same argument.
The cliff considers it,
gives a little, remains.

I have been standing here an hour.
In geological terms
I have not arrived yet.
This is somehow a comfort.

At 3am the rain is different.
It has given up performing
and is simply being rain —
steady, indifferent, complete.

I lie here thinking about all the things
I have misunderstood.
The list is reassuringly long.
It means I have been paying attention.

By 4am the rain has stopped.
The silence it leaves behind
is a different kind of silence —
one that knows what it has replaced.