- for Fruitfly and Voo -
Stepping Out
Come, dearest reader – step out.
Step out of your room, wherever you are.
Bid goodnight to all that you know there,
in your outpost before the far.
Your gaze in its confusion
can barely pry itself free of its door,
and your tread is unpersuaded
that it might well abandon that floor.
But lift up your might with your weary eyes
and place it against the sky.
Place it in the center of a world
which around it will roll on by.
It could be in a word, a thing you say,
grown huge and ripe in quiet.
You’ll seize its meaning, turn away,
and leave a brave new world to riot.
So leave behind your room and your claim
and whatever else you’re about.
Whoever you are, step out of your room.
Whoever you are, step out.
Your Restless Clang
My child, the song that you play on your lute
runs through this night like footsteps.
Your soul has all but lost its way
in that song and its shadowy depths.
Why do you lure it into such a place
where it languishes and pines?
Your soul is strong, but your song is yet stronger –
of steely bars and vines.
Grant it silence and your soul may return
to the home in which it breathed,
where it filled up all its innermost spaces
before that home was thieved.
It already beats its wings more faintly –
you see how you waste its flight.
They no longer carry you over these walls
unto my deep delight.
You see, my child, you’ve imprisoned your soul
in your ever restless clang.
Hang up your lute on the walls of desire.
Hang it up and ease that pang.
Lullaby
- for Stella -
I’d like to serenade you to sleep,
to lay beside you and be there,
accompany you on your long ascent,
beside you from stair to stair.
And I’d like to be the last one awake
to know that the night was cold.
I’d listen in and out of all of your worlds
to each thing that they hold.
The clocks ring in and out of each other.
One sounds the bottom of time.
It draws me deep into unconcern,
which glistens like rime upon rhyme.
From outside emerges a final sound,
like a token of the strange.
It yields to the sleepiest likenesses,
with their promises of change.
My child, I close my eyes upon you.
To you I surrender my stride.
Let us fall into each other’s sleep –
a sleep many silences wide.
Accordion
- to the spirit of Piazzolla -
In which streets have you been, accordion,
before you strolled into mine?
Do hundreds play you, or only one?
Do your airs filter coarse or fine?
Like you, I’ve returned from foreign lands
to men eternally at home.
Their hours stand dumbly around their tables,
while we think where next to roam.
Their world reaches deep inside me.
Perhaps it’s unpeopled, like the moon.
And the words in which they live are outlived,
unlike your wandering tune.
The things I brought with me from afar
seem extravagant next to theirs.
At home they were the wildest beasts,
though here they’re domesticated mares.
Accordion, I live among people
who force you to sing out loud:
“Life is heavier than all heaviness –
its substance, its slough, its shroud.”
Prayer in Autumn
It is time, dear Sir. We are calling you now.
Your summer was immense.
Lay your shadow on the sundial.
Drape your curtains across the fence.
Command the last fruits to be full,
while on the meadows the winds run free.
Give them a final few southerly days
to ripen upon their tree.
Urge them on into completion
and chase their sweetness into their wine.
Who has no house now will never build one,
though he’s free to admire mine.
Who is now alone will remain alone
in the confines of his room,
and will look out upon the falling leaves –
the leaves that will line his tomb.
So come out, Sir. Emerge once more
into the finale of your year,
and command that the full become the stark
and the great become the mere.
Up Close and From Afar
- for Vinnie -
Each evening a song swirls among your things
and brings, from over its bridge,
figures that once did and didn’t exist.
They gather upon your ridge.
There are youthful ones and widowed ones
at the latter end of their days,
manners of speaking that are but a sign
for the questions that you’ll raise,
cities that swelled in fortune
before surrendering to Neptune’s flow,
many thousand similes and likenesses
by means of which you’ll grow,
lutes and mandolins that accompanied
destinies, farewells and sighs.
And each, my child, is rooted in you,
in order out of you to rise.
In this song, each thing repeats itself –
each grimace, each hovel, each star.
You halloo them in their orbit around you –
up close and from afar.
The Great Turning
Speak softly, Sir. If they heard you,
they might think it was the final blast,
when all former moments will reappear
on the threshold of the last.
The shrieking will give way to a greater standstill
in which nothing’s heard.
All things will return home to their Thing
and all words return to the Word.
Are you not frightened by this wheeling of days,
this progress toward that end?
Can you not find among us one
who will swim against the way things tend?
Who will reanimate sense and desire,
bowing himself on all strings?
Who will, out of love, regard the Thing,
while from it withholding its things?
Oh, stem the great turning over which
the powerful waters cascade.
At the expense, perhaps, of what you are,
halt the flow of what you made.
My Likenesses
Like birds grown used to walking,
when they appear as if their flight’s in fall,
like a casketed face in blank inattention
to the final call,
like hands that hesitate
because in their flask what’s mirrored isn’t near,
like words that mean nothing definite
but scrape around the inner ear,
like an early morning in spring,
outfacing the windows of the ill,
like drunkards who have lost their names,
abandoning themselves to their swill,
like those who died ere they were robbed
of such woes as were just once pronounced,
like things that disappoint their expected heights,
unseen and unannounced –
so comprised, these things I seemed, myself…
but I didn’t live in that house.
As if someone had drafted my likeness
but had built it somewhere else.