Sweet nothing. Sweet, sweet nothing.

In the garden hard light falls on wild grapes:

houses of purple wound in wisteria

or held to the mouth while lizards, dead, dry beside you

on the brick pathway. Their eyes, the azalea seeds

of next season, their sisters, so deep and still in the shrubs

that they become the shrubs

and the darkness in them. They become the wind-undulated pattern

of shadows and leaves, the slight color of sky around the branches,

the sleeping moth. They become

the old man you watched walk down the wharf

one morning with a fishing rod

until he vanished

into the fog and cries of gulls;

beside you, the rotted oars of a rowboat black with flies,

the beach grass, and a cloud

of sand for you to write your name in.

The earth is almost convincing

but then it is winter. Then snow

fills the bony hands of trees

and the eye sockets of a fox who starved in the fall,

and pushes up against the steel gate

recently converted from a clean black

to religion of rust.

And then I can’t help but think of snowmelt—

how so much comes back from oblivion

for the eye. How, all along, under the snow

the garden was sleeping,

and under the garden, the worms and the burnt world—

the hardened ash of the air we move through.

Love is brief: forgetting lasts so long.

-Pablo Nerdua

If it was not for you

my body would have gone on darkening

unnoticed under a maple in the park.

I would have turned so deeply into myself

and become so still

that even the dead, who collect

rainwater in their mouths

as if it is something precious,

would be more a part of this earth

than I am. And by now their skin

is the white of this blank page,

the white of winter months that offer

only the usual– dead spiders drying,

disregarded, on the windowsill.

and the white of the bed sheets

you wrapped yourself into

in such a way that I knew

you would soon be gone.

*

I want to pull you out of me

and place you on this page

so I can watch the color of your eyes

drain. So I can see

how the light was held

in your open mouth while you slept

and I can feel your body

under mine, feel your waist,

your shoulders, & the soft acreage

of skin on your neck that I always kissed. On this page

I will turn you into a country

where even the dead animals I find in the park

have gardens growing through their ribs

and skulls. And the flowers from the eyes

shift in light, almost

as if they are unsure of their own existence.

And since this is only a poem

and can end anyway I’d like,

I will find the quietest plot of land

where the grass is whitening

and spread out a blanket for us

in the shade.

Now that all the wasps are gone and the hive is a silent town,

I can sleep out under this elm again.

*

I would like to explain how a house someone has just been found

hanging in becomes different, as if the rooms widen and gape

yet hold less air. Outside

the gardenias darken in late afternoon

and sag in the rain. The light

landing on their petals is somehow unlike the light that lands

on the dead, but I don’t know why.

And above the white flowers a spider

can continue breathing quietly

and never know the difference.

its web, strung in a dogwood, waits for flies.

*

In 1981 my parents graduated from college.

Everything on the east coast

seemed quieter and heavier and naked.

All through August it was ninety and raining and I think

if my father had then stood perfectly still

before a tunnel full of wet leaves

and looked far into that darkness, he would never speak

again. But what I need to know is

when I’m fifty, will I remember how it felt

to be twenty-three and lonely in Boston?

Will I think of that park bench

and how all summer I counted the lights going out

in the apartments that surrounded me. The Charles

river to my back, dark and blind.

*

And, now, in this kitchen with its white curtains and sink

I watch an ant crawl on the table,

then up the window, and all I can be certain of is that

if I lean close enough to anything and close my eyes,

I can smell the dead. By winter

the snow will quiet everything

and teeth will blacken in their skulls

like mirrors that reflect the night. A night

that nobody owns, where the stars are a voiceless

closet that I could walk into thirty years from now,

folding a hanger carefully, and never walk out of.

And if you were to find me then

and turn and leave without ever looking up,

you would not notice the sky

and the black hole that opened and yawned over everything

as if it is a cold house that even silence

cannot escape.

In this dark autumn Eden

even the leaves are unnamed.

Burnt orange, they fall to earth

& the black oaks

take back the horizon.

And when, in the indigo stillness,

all is cool & laying down to breathe

I wonder what forgets

the sun & the pale light which will soon spread

Itself again through thinning woods.

Morning is only a myth

to those Born in the night 

& to the ancient Greeks stars were windows

To a fire that surrounds us.

Our universe was burning

 long before we could put words to form.

When did Adam name everything

& when will atom take it back;

back to that quiet

thats resting above ponds

 in late autumn

When the sky darkens over a smoldering sun

& Nagasaki is finally

calm.