make it across the bridge,
who sits down in the grit and dust of it with his wrinkled sack
of groceries that will have to last. A song of his foolish bravery
and terror, his hope that will not stay focused, that wanders
a springtime path between peach trees
and the berries, humming something, forgetting,
and humming again. A song of his wishes
tossing their hats in the wind and watching the last boat
depart, its cargo of nameless meaning casting flowers, waving
out of sight as the sun goes down.
It is a song of memory’s little ways and sudden corner-like loveliness
turned to smoke and broken glass it eats and eats
to stay marginally alive. A song of the bridge that never ends
really, and never whispers this
as the old man listens for the one spot of silence
or the one clear voice that might be his.
DESPERATELY COMPOSED
I wake on a small raft
and see her swimming away
with a cat under each arm
and wearing the sun
like a kind of sombrero.
Again I have not been chosen.
What will I drink, so far from land?
Where will I find flowers enough
to keep me breathing what
St. Francis called “the Perfect Air,”
the pneuma of hope’s tiny bells
announcing the hours of supplication
and grace?
She is far from me now, a speck
rising and dipping on the dazzle,
on a glinting of green trumpets that call
and call as Mahler drifts past
in a clef-shaped canoe and I toss him
a story in which a man dreams himself
beyond thought, beyond the farthest
point of land, where what he loves
has left him widened and cloudy,
the great sky somehow come
into his broken-fingered notation
turning slowly all night, lifting
as I do, waving to her, imploring
the angels to open themselves,
tune their instruments and pretend
that he is one of them, or they
more of him than he can count.
CROSSING JORDAN
Having eaten the chickens, dogs, cattle, horses, our belts,
leather vests, and shoes, we came at last to the river,
great silver-blue spillage carving its monument and grave
in the endless grass.
We fell face down and drank, a writhing stillness
filling us like lust
or the sort of prayer they don’t
teach you.
Leaves revolved on the stream like golden boats, carelessly adrift,
open to the sky that seemed to be watching as we herded small fish
into the shallows and ate them alive
and squirming.
Later we made fire in the shadow of a cutbank
and slept and rose and ate and drank again and slept
and on the third day
we rose
as our Lord, to whom we had prayed all the way from St. Joe
and who had indeed delivered us
so that we thought the far shore surely must flow with milk
and something sweet.
So we made our crossing, the stream being wide but shallow.
Only one nine-year-old boy broke the human chain and so
was swept away.
Brother Jacoby said it was what God and the river required
by way of sacrifice, and the boy’s father went for him with a knife.
Thus discord came upon us and a taint
upon the new land
so that some of us longed for our lives as they had been
before we dared to cross the glinting vein, before
we dared the Lord to give us
everything.
But, finally, with the river at our backs it seemed wrong
to think of this.
Praise the Lord and his angels, we said, when we buried the torn
and bloated boy,
who had reached down with both hands for something bright
in the water.
BUT BEFORE THAT
we lay awake all night, dreams thickening
like hair in the cold branches
and ready to descend, ready to know
what
