Constable’s Clouds, For Keats (audio only)
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At Night
When did I know that I’d have to carry it around
in order to have it when I need it, say in a pocket,
the dark itself not dark enough but needing to be
added to, handful by handful if necessary, until
the way my mother would sit all night in a room
without the lights, smoking, until she disappeared?
2019
In Passing
On the Canadian side, we're standing far enough away
the Falls look like photography, the roar a radio.
In the real rain, so vertical it fuses with the air,
the boat below us is starting for the caves.
Everyone on deck is dressed in black, braced for weather
and crossing against the current of the river.
They seem lost in the gorge dimensions of the place,
then, in fog, in a moment, gone.
In the Chekhov story,
the lovers live in a cloud, above the sheer witness of a valley.
They call it circumstance.2000
Infidelity
The two-toned Olds swinging sideways out of the drive, the bone-white gravel kicked up in a shot, my mother in the deathseat half out the door, the door half shut--she's being pushed or wants to jump, I don't remember. The Olds is two kinds of green, hand-painted, and blows black smoke like a coal-oil fire. I'm stunned and feel a wind, like a machine, pass through me, through my heart and mouth; I'm standing in a field not fifty feet away, the wheel of the wind closing the distance. Then suddenly the car stops and my mother falls with nothing, nothing to break the fall . .
1989