The Hold

There it is! Just before putting out the light.
Here in the doorway to his room.
The unmistakable smell of him,
though his train pulled out an hour ago.
Not a child’s smell anymore, but a young man’s air
of college nights and long wool coats
and jokes so cool they cannot be explained.
“You had to be there, Dad,” he says.

Now in his scented wake I wait,
knowing he’ll soon be gone for good,
graduating to some new city,
paying too much rent.
And this room where for years he slept
and read, while brown hair broke through
on his face and chest… Soon
it will be a place for someone else to rest. 
But not quite yet. 

This fragrant air is sweet to me
tonight. The dusty heat rising
from baseboard vents. The windows tight. 
His house-warmed high school books
upright in their case.
Like me, they’ve done their work.
What we instructors had to say
has all been said. And what he took to heart
is as unfathomable now
as what he cast away. 

For he’s moving on and on his own
to worlds he’ll live to see
but I will never fully know. Of course
he’ll stop again to sleep and eat.

We’ll speak again of Charlemagne
and Russell Crowe. But the being of him,
that second self housed for years
nearly inside my skin, is elsewhere
flowing on, flown.

How does a father live, I wonder.
But it’s late now. At the stair
my wife is calling. And so I remember
that morning my son was first handed to me,
still blood-smudged and birth-slippery.
And because I was a new father then
and because my inexperience showed
the midwife taught me how to hold a child properly.
“Lightly now,” she cautioned. 
But also pulling at my arms, testing me,
until I sensed what it meant
not to let go.

The Planting

In a dark time we planted a tree we planted
a flowering crab-apple tree during a hard time
we planted it in our front yard though in saying
we planted I mean we paid for the tree
at a nursery where not everyone believed
ours is an evil time two strong men delivered
the tree in a truck they dug a wide hole where
we asked them to they rolled and lifted
the tarped rootball into the ground
stepped back to make sure it stood straight
and tall we also stood back from the tree
trying our best to be good in a bad time
we watched young pointed leaves resting
very still until the men began filling
the hole leaves then quivered with each
dirt shovel-full we planted a tree because
trees make us happy but we weren’t altogether
good in an evil time who can be. we planted
the tree for brilliant colors in spring
and we’ll water it this first year knowing
all we do about dry times we want it to thrive
we hope sunlight and starlight and rains
will fall over it and birds fly into it we choose
to believe that in dark times to come
our tree will show beautiful green shapes
each summer how hard to be right
in a bad time when a spring wind came up
we heard the tree rustle for the first time
what does it mean to be good
in an evil time we trust this tree
will blossom and fill and shed fall leaves
long after we’re gone was it for hope
we planted a tree was it for happiness
was it for beauty in a hard time as always
wasn’t it also too much about us in a dark time
no one is good enough we planted a tree
in our yard we hoped we lived through
our times on the earth we should’ve done
better we could’ve done more

Mercy

And afterwards, furnaced by midday Roman heat

and tired steps away from St. Peters and the Pope’s
golf-cart ride through the square’s adoring crowd,
we were resting within an ancient arched portico

when the two white pigeons winged down, settling
on the t-shirt shoulders of our eight-year-old daughter.
Cautiously—half-delighted, half-frightened— she

raised arms and the birds stepped along them, perching
finally on uplifted hands. Gravely Jeanne looked at
us then, with a spirit that made us feel mysteriously

taller, younger, fortunate, cared for. . . whatever word
best describes that which we search restless worlds for,
pry open resentful hearts for, drop to bended knees for,

but which seems to come only as those pigeons came.
When we’re worn. When we’ve all but given up on
making more of our day or the year or ourselves,

having lost faith that such finery will ever be bestowed
on us again. Yet isn’t that how it arrives? Unbidden
and glossed so abundantly that momentarily, like

children, we don’t care if it never comes again.

Crying Man

At O’Hare, after a first jump west to California,
I thought my father was dying, as I waited  

for the connecting flight.  Being hungry
I ate pizza with the people eating pizza.   

Feeling uninformed, I bought newspapers,
opened magazines at a bookshop wall.   

Near my gate, I pretended not to watch
a dozen others waiting, as they pretended  

not to watch me. But finally, in a hectic airport
restroom, I heard the crying man in his stall.  

Oh God, he cried, behind a stained steel door.  
He didn’t sound old. And in his privacy, not shy.  

Oh Dear God, rang harshly in the close tiled room. 
I stood alongside others, a simple traveler

at a public urinal.  Behind me the restless waited
their turns. Oh dear life came the third cry.   

I shook myself, zipped, found a vacant sink for washing. 
Spurting water dwindled to a trickle on my hands.  

I lathered and rinsed as I’d been taught. Grabbed
for paper towel. Did not linger at the mirror.

Polk Street

I don’t remember who chose the shabby tavern
on Polk Street three blocks north of Market,  
only that we landed there afternoons after another  

tedious law school class, lounging at its lacquered
mahogany bar near the square, filthy, street-facing
plate-glass window and its neon MILLERS sign.    

There was the one ancient gimpy bartender coughing
his smoker’s cough in the shadows, and an erratic
overhead flickering from bare-bulb fluorescents,      

and liquor stocks shelved before a mirror reflecting
both a second image of each bottle and our own  
two faces stenciled by the bar’s tinseled, mirrored light.   

No doubt you know a place like it.  There must be  
a thousand places like it.  But no other with my sister
on the high leather stool beside me, lighting up   

a mentholed Newport, sipping her vodka martini,
still droll and sun-blonde, fresh and wicked-clever
and cocky at twenty-eight for all her weaknesses. 

I’d complain about our dull professors.  She would
make me laugh as only she could, turning the hour
privileged and superb, reducing our current troubles

to brief stations we’d glide through effortlessly
together.  Carolyn would do good work in the years
ahead.  She would draft laws still on the books

in California, and before drink took over her life
she made the world better for people.  For many  
people, those who know her work still maintain. 

They say you can’t go back but I ask what matters
more after everything that happens.  My sister slips
a Newport from its box.  I strike a match and watch

the red glow of tobacco igniting as her cigarette
nears my half-cupped hand.  Fruitless maybe, 
yet I go back if only to save a fraction of her liveliness, 

even just the match-light’s flare in her face.  Though
doubtless she’d argue, if she could, that I also return
for last word in what became our life-long debate.

Calling for a fresh martini and swinging back my way
Carolyn cheerfully tries to persuade again that nothing,
not she nor I nor anything else can be saved.

Blue for Oceans

Astonishing that he could forget and forget and remember so.
California for example. The trees for some reason especially. 

Leaving but not losing them. Believing he never would. 
Then one day finding March and April gone without a thought

for the peeling eucalyptus, the palms leaning long avenues
the hazy, sky-backed timberlines of the Coast Range.

Years later in a stucco house outside Rome he woke again
to the same yellow-brown light, the dry tile roofs. But the trees

were wrong. Pointed cedars, not aspen or Santa Rosa plum.
Groves of olives, not redwoods. Afterwards, the last clear time

was an evening with his daughter, making a map of the world
out of clay, painting in brown for mountains and blue for oceans,

reading about the scientist who first claimed Africa and America
were once joined. On each side, long-ago animals and jungle birds

watched from trees as a last narrowing isthmus washed away. 
For some time after, the gap remained a slight stream 

easily forded or even leaped across, one continent to another.
Then years widened the strait and far shores fell away

until only a gull or a seed on a great wind
could cross over the space that was once a world.

House

We were all of us there. We three children
for the first time. Our house-proud father,    
the brass door-key trailing on a chain from his hand.  

Our mother’s holding my younger brother’s,   
her mind’s-eye wandering room to room,
locating a sofa here, unrolling carpets there,   

arranging tables and chairs to last the year   
or a lifetime as it happened. Five lifetimes.   
For there were five of us. Yes, and no one but us

exploring the coved-ceiling strangeness,   
the heaviness of plaster-walled rooms, the elegant
rectangles of wan window-light crossing floors.   

                                    *

We kids opened cupboards, drawers. All empty,
as the ghostly thrumming refrigerator was empty.   
As if no one had lived in this house before,  

cooked here or slept, showered here or wept.   
Though my sister, doing her best Nancy Drew,
insisted we search for a sign. Surely someone

left one or two tell-tales behind. We pulled off
shoes, half running, half skating in socks
across chestnut-colored floors and down  

the t-shaped hall to rooms that drew us like heroes,
as if it was honor to first touch each closet’s
end-wall, to slide gamely over cool yellow-tiled

bathroom floor. Nothing. We found nothing.                                                                                                   
No washcloth in the tub.  No residues of soap
at the sinks. No sign of any life but ours

until Mom called us to the back bedroom,  
to a small framed photo barely noticeable
against roses of a faded, papered wall.     

Dad lifted it from a nail, brought the frame
low and we five gathered to consider
the white-haired, dark-suited man

held at the waist by a wrinkled smiling woman,
his arm over the shoulder of a younger man
uniformed for war. They squinted

against bright California sun. They stood
beneath a stucco arch on the front porch
of this very house, now our house. 

                                    *

No way to ask what happened to the photo   
as it’s impossible now for Dad to recall
the rest of that day or those following

when movers trucked us across town, old house
to new. So much is lost as it happens forever.  
Two months after he died I pulled Dad’s suits

from his closet, removed each wood hanger,   
folded coats and trousers, laid them in cartons,
drove the boxes to Goodwill.  How the suits smelled

of him. And four years later I knelt
in the hall outside a bedroom where Mom
lay dying. I was sorting the sixty-year

clutter of family photos nestled in a drawer.     
It wouldn’t be long before I would take
what I wanted, before I’d walk the bare floors

with furniture sold off, packed off, gone.   
For old time’s sake I might take off my shoes.   
But which photos would I choose?    

And of what holiday? From which decade?
So many family faces topping navy blazers
and Easter dresses, or floating above

a white-clothed Thanksgiving table. Before
the house-sale closes should I prop one frame
on the mantle, one picture to signify the lives

that rose and fell inside? But what new owner
would care, or care enough. And afterwards
won’t shadows still follow me room to room,   

the years refuse to let go my hand.  
O what does it mean, what can it possibly mean   
to leave the past behind?

Our Year

Still, there is hope this fading year
that next year will be our year

for a winter hike to the island quarry.
After the holidays, I’d propose. 

In January, when dormant hardwoods
clatter in the wind and only a stray spruce

or cardinal lives for color. At such times
the quarry sleeps ice-locked

beneath sifting skins of snow. If it’s safe
and thick enough, I’ll take you out

across the ice to that spot
we swam so many summers ago.

We’ll walk again on water, solid now
beneath our feet. And I’ll scrape clean

a snow-window for staring down
the frozen mirror of the deep.

Maybe only fissures will be revealed.
Or rising bubbles captured in the blue.

At least we’ll see two bundled faces
looking back. And even so close to longest

night, surely some remnant sun will flash
above the trees and find us there—

parchment-lit, in the open—and stir us
in a winter way we’ve never known.

Then let the sun flash on across our quarry.
Love, let it glitter in the quarry stone.

This Wreck

And yes, to answer your first question
that old car is my car in the front yard
with its three stained hubcaps
and weeds growing up around the soft tires
and a bird-shit spattered hood
that last fall’s leaves have worked under.

And yes, it was a well-polished maroon
when I bought it those years ago
a time I remember my wife being pregnant again
and wanting a reliable car
that wouldn’t break down during labor
or on the way to the hospital.  Or as it happened
on that unforeseen third morning of her life
when we drove our daughter away from home
after midnight blanketed in the new blue car seat
running a funny little newborn fever
her doctor cleared his telephone voice about
before saying he’d be waiting
in the emergency room when we came in.

And yes, he was there in his brown cardigan
after we made the harrowing five-mile drive.
And he stayed with us in the brilliant examining room
as specialists appeared in their coats
and the one upholding a spinal tap syringe
after seeing my face suggested we’d all be better off
if I waited in the next room.

And yes, there followed some weeks
cut off at the knees, and stunned cigarette hours
in the unforgettable hospital parking garage
before being hauled off like freight to my next stop
by gasoline exploding in the cylinders.
And yes, fortunately the meningitis was caught early.
And she was a lucky girl the doctors said
and we were all lucky then and now
that’s she’s better than o.k. with her dancing
and her clean brown hair pinned up in a bun.

And yes, you can understand how sometimes
these high summer evenings home late from work
I open all four doors of the old car
until the steaming inside swollen air escapes.
And settling into one broken seat or another
I look out through the chipped windshield,
inhaling the stale sour wonderful
sun-blasted upholstery smell.  And then I try thinking
of nothing but roadmaps baking safely in the glove-box
and ballet shoes being tied by small fingers
and nobody going anywhere ever again
in this wreck that will stay in my yard
thank you dear God
for as long as the rest of this takes.

The Polishings

In the warm painted porch of our old stucco house,
at the legged laundry sink
covered with a plywood board,
my father taught me as he’d been taught,
how a salesman should polish his good shoes.

“Make them shine enough to speak,” he insisted. 
“They’re your first step through the door.” 
He’d spread out newspaper, rags and brushes
and metal tins that twisted open with a pop,
revealing creams—deep brown, black, cordovan.

He taught me by doing with his own two hands:
a rag doubled to keep the gob of polish
from bleeding through; the non-master hand
like a foot inside the worked-on shoe
to hold it steady;
the thorough coating and spreading over leather

of waxy color, starting from scuffed toe
then down the instep-side to heel and back to toe. 
Once both shoes were creamed over,
he lit a cigarette to let the glazed pair dry. 
Hurried brushing, he’d say,
made a short-lived shine that wouldn’t last half a day

of cold calls on the road.  My father knew so much
in his handsome hands—
gilded with a rectangled wristwatch,
a wedding band, and between knuckles,
wiry sprays of golden hair.  I can still see
one hand hidden inside a brogue, the other gripping

the wooden brush as it bristled out a leathered glow. 
How long did they last
those lessons on the porch? One year? Two? 
How long the morning polishings with the jobless day
before him, a son watching, a wife waiting
and no door but ours to walk through.

More than Mountains

Wasn’t our first question whether the map
could be trusted? And didn’t we set out to test it
by following to the source one of those silver

snow-melt streams that wrinkled down a side canyon
feeding the green river in the canyon below? 
And isn’t that why we forded the river that morning

barefoot with our boots tied around our necks
and then climbed the dusty switchbacks
until our knees ached and our heels blistered

and our t-shirts stuck to the smalls of our backs?
And didn’t we keep climbing when the trail left off—
losing sight of the stream often—by following

the downhill, trickling, water-sound that led us up 
finally to a field of bear grass and a lake walled in
by rockslides loosed from the peaks above? 

And why weren’t we satisfied to rest there and swim
instead of filling our canteens, circling the lake
and plotting the next leg of our climb? 

Did we both have the same idea—being young
and well-equipped—of reaching a peak that day? 
Or did one persuade the other that the last leg

would be an easy scramble over raw boulders
once we left the hampering brush behind?
It wasn’t, but when we got to the first high ridge—

both of us gasping, hearts pumping, half dizzy
under the breathless, western sky—
didn’t you want to go on as I did?

And wasn’t a higher one waiting for us
and then a third further on where we finally stopped,
realizing the ridges might go on and on

without certainty of height ever being established
by us at least, our judgments already distorted  
by thin air, by the metallic, high-altitude light?

Yet wasn’t this summit what we’d aimed for,
this being above and yet surrounded
by mountains going off into mountains,

folding over and down into a distance dappled 
by more and everlasting mountains? 
What was the restlessness then, the necessity 

that stood us up against our exhaustion,
that set us casting about, kicking and knocking loose
random stones on the flat of our ridge?

What were we dreaming of more than mountains?
What did we feel in the stones that made us gather them
first into a ring, then a cairn, then an upright shape 

that gradually took on the appearance of a man?
Remember the horizontal slab I found for shoulders
and the squared-off block you placed for the head?

Didn’t we try our best to make a standing man 
and to face him west, returning the sun’s late gaze?
And in raising him up did you not find yourself

naming this figure in your mind, as I did?
And later, burnt-out, sweat-chilled, half-staggering
down hard ridges into valley twilight

didn’t other names occur to you as well,
word-forms that tumbled out of the mountains
as things do in the dusk, taking shape suddenly

from nothing, then falling back, reabsorbed?
Did you think the names would never be forgotten?
Yet do you remember even half of them now

half as well as you do our cold camp that night,
or the next-day muscle ache, or the morning forest light
you called breakfast light, as pale 

and washed out as the green half-tones of the map 
we carried all that summer, unfolding it
and refolding it until the creases finally tore?

Green

Some days I walk down the street
where we lived and the fat man
who stole tomatoes
sits under the same old sycamore
tapping out his angry rhythms
on the knotted roots. And though
the children are no longer ours,
the oaks are no less generous
to the sidewalks with their shade. 
Overhead, sweet air still arrives
through many simple branches—
some reaching skyward for joy,
others downcast for a reason. 
We were like good trees
the years we lived on this street. 
We were so green. Fresh as leaves.
And the days whispered through us.

Chapel and Olive

Cold and nearly chilled through, we’re walking up Chapel Street,
home from the park at Wooster Square, passing the Polish mortuary

recently developed into condos, the boarded up Lutheran Church
doubtless also soon to be, and Salvino’s Flower Shop, always dark

and without flowers now as the owner died in June. Christmas lights
wink on and off around the tall, sashed windows of a stick Victorian    

though it’s the last day of December and not yet mid-afternoon. 
Grinding along Chapel, an empty city bus steams the frigid air

with exhaust, its giant tires churning the street-chopped snow. 
Have I mentioned yesterday’s storm? Our narrow side-streets

and sidewalks remain mostly unplowed and it’s an adventure
side-stepping banks of fresh snow. Because you hold my arm

to keep from slipping I can’t hold yours. Yet being held by you
steadies me all the same. We understand why geese fly south

and the rich buy second homes in Florida. . . why the park’s
unshoveled paths were empty today. People fall here in winter.

They slip, break a bone or hip, often don’t recover. They fall
even without the distractions of squirrels leaping tree to tree   

or you pointing out to me, as we walked, the black fallen branches
like bent arms grounded on the park-lawn’s snow. The thicker limbs

reminded you of Franz Kline’s paintings and your saying it made me
see it too. Now stopped at the red light, our breaths cloud out 

into the intersection as we talk about Kline’s zenishness, the empty
fullness of his canvas spaces and how yesterday’s strongest winds

probably struck the park late in the day to bring down such heavy
limbs, dropping them so elegantly atop the new snow. Another

bus groans by.  Snow muffles the city’s winter noises, waffles
the chain link fences white. A delivery truck fish-tails to a stop

as the signal at Olive turns green. We’re ready to step off the curb
and Chapel stretches ahead of us, a straight uphill mile past Yale

to the hospital.  But though we haven’t come far or have far to go
I’m tired. Still unrecovered. Not yet myself. And caught now  

by memories of an air-conditioned surgical suite. . .my thin gown,  
the chilled steel bedrails, the one nurse needling an IV into my arm

while another whispered positive affirmations in my ear. A voice
tells you to count backwards. So you count into darkness. When

you wake they tell you to walk. So you walk. And though with cancer
it’s always too early to speak of cure, they tell you to live “as if,”

to plan a full future anyway. Now crossing Olive street, I practice
their method. I picture arriving at my building, stomping snow

from boots, opening the door to a warm, high-windowed apartment
where maybe you’ll sketch for a while or stretch out on a sofa

and leaf through the Joan Mitchell book you gave me for Christmas.
I’ll brew coffee, eat a chocolate cookie from the tin, wonder

whether the corner of Chapel and Olive might figure in a poem.
Maybe I’ll make notes, write a line or two about the park

and how this year ended. . .walking together without falling,  
chatting about art, yesterday’s storm and the lovely, black-on-white

branches on the park snow. Maybe a poem will make more of it.
Or maybe my lines will end where they began. . .at a winter intersection,

the red light against us, yet taking heart as a green light beckons,  
setting out arm in arm across Olive Street’s snow-smeared pavement,

touched by what we can’t control or forget, yet letting hope
have its way with us, as we walk together toward home.

A Few Minutes Past Nine

1.

He woke naturally to the slow, much-alike
mornings.  Bed-rails chroming brighter at dawn.
Room-lamps paling.  Windows sluggishly filling
with light.  Now his fourth week of manning
the five-to-noon shift since arriving
from the East Coast.  Now the old house again
imperceptibly coming to life
as he fulfilled promises made to her
and to himself: he would stay to the end;
he would feel whatever there was to feel;
he would remember how death came for her.  

2.

So he had prepared, opening himself morning
after morning to the possible hour,
to the appearance and recognition
whenever it came.  It came without warning
that Tuesday.  First felt as a quickening,
then as an exquisite intimacy,
a solemn concentration entering
her bedroom.  He felt joined by it.  Joined to it. 
Pictures on walls loomed closer.  Her vasolined
lips parted as if to speak, though she was days
now beyond speech.  Her brow smoothed.  Her breath
dwindled, lulled.  Or what he thought was a lull.   
Then it happened.  A few minutes after nine.   
No other breath.  Only a final flutter
as flesh sank at the folds of her neck,  
his mother’s delicate parting move. 

3.

He wasn’t disappointed.  This wasn’t
an occasion for disappointment.  Yet
he’d hoped for more.  Selfishly, he’d wanted
a last sign or gesture.   Or more grandly,
more beautifully, he’d hoped to witness
as in a dream or poem, bright soul released
from worn body.  Was it so wrong, his longing
at the last for her imperishable self,
the spirit he’d known his whole life by way
of feeling?  Why not show herself plainly
in a last dance before vanishing? 
But as it happened he sensed no presence,
no release or escape, no confirmation
of his mother’s faith.  Nothing to console
beyond a dry sense of accomplishment,
that the last task they’d ever conceive
and together carry out was achieved.

4.

Her mouth had fallen open.  Standing over her,
he saw a gray, fissured tongue, yellowed teeth. 
His hands reached to close the mouth, held it closed. . .
as days before a nurse had suggested,
whispering,  Before rigor sets in.
Her chin felt warm.  And either from that touch
or his letting go, a greater feeling rose. 
Not mourning or sorrow.  Not spiking grief. 
But a child-like sense of discovery, 
an excitement, as if truth’s long-hidden shape 
had been thrillingly revealed.  It was so simple. 
She had loved him.  He’d loved her.  So obvious. 
Yet suddenly amazing.  She was gone. 
He remained.  Also amazing.  He longed
to speak, to summon right and perfect words
for unexpected joy.  Why be sorry?
She’d lived her life.  Now was dead.  Forever
and always dead.  She was complete and he was glad.  

5.

Soundlessly a digit on her bedside clock
changed.  He caught sight of the movement, noted
the time, as a nurse had also instructed. 
From an open jar of skin cream on the bureau
a familiar fragrance.  And gradually
in the spare morning light his exaltation
drained.  What to do now?  Whom must he call? 
But he remained in his chair, registering
bed-blanket drape, the body’s absolute
stillness.  He grew aware of an unfamiliar
silence—the stitch, stitch, unspooling thread
of a particular silence—then rising
in him, mixing with the quiet moment,
a memory of the ancient camellia bush
outside her bedroom window where now—
just as some fifty years before when
she’d call him to witness the eerie hoverings—
a hummingbird fed on scarlet flowers.