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Vo l . 9 N o . 1
Some Night Music Shouldn’t there be some rule of logic? Some rule like the Calculus of Relations? Or some formula factoring love and distance And flesh times time? Something Einsteinian, perhaps, explaining With the mathematical elegance of astronomy or Bach The complexities of life after your death? Can you still see me? In that chill uninterrupted space Past that last singing planet, do you still hear me? Is there some far off prominence where you watch In only so much light as stars once brought This still warm curve of thigh? Elegance be damned, I’d like to think You would be pleased to turn your distant sight Upon this place and hear at last My small night songs of gladness That each morning brings once more A bright, heaped-up sun rising enormous On the edge of autumn’s clear and crayoned days.
Going Into Winter It is starting to snow out over the lake. It is important my wrist not fail this weight of bone grit and ash, staining the lake. But what now is to be done with the box? I had not considered the box--its hard blackness, the brevity of its labelled summation: “Cremains: Name DOB DOD File # Is there a prescribed ritual of disposal? Does one burn it with proper solemnity? A kind of mini-cremation? If so, then, what of the residue? Does one cast it out over a pond with seemly ceremony? Is there a metaphor here? Is this black box a receptacle of a receptacle? A problem of infinite regression? What is the validity of frames?
Chilled by this early winter, I must remember how I once stood in the light of your look, how I would rise each morning recreated and estimable. Now on this hard ground of winter, I want to write of loons at the lake dreaming of returns. But those who know of such things tell me writing of loons at the lake is the worst sort of cliché--and this is true also of waterfalls. I want to write of Summit Lake where sudden snowmelt falls down over the rocks in panic, where the road goes weighed down by a low sky and beaver mounds heap empty in black ponds. And of the hard choice to love my life. It snows again. And I must learn new words for each day’s weather.