1. NOW
It is turning now,
the boat of our aspirations.
The wild rope
swings
from the cottonwood tree
out over the river.
Turning now,
the rope swing,
the boat,
the river.
Turning now,
the rope swing,
the boat,
the river.
2. AT 81, WRITING
In the clarity of early morning
he sits, writing. Sunlight
touches the fine hairs on his arm.
Muscles ripple gently
as he moves his pencil,
the veins on the back of his hand
illuminated. Little rivers.
His worn cap is half in shadow,
his childhood on the farm
a field his pencil plows,
new lines
against furrows of forgetting.
3. BLESS THE NOW
Bless the sweetness
of the final days.
Praise the last time
he will understand
the first time you tell him
how to boil an egg.
Bless the first time
you understand
that he cannot understand.
Bless the silence
when he gives himself
to sleep and bless
the waking and his knowing
who you are
again.
Bless the look
behind you. Bless
the years when he was strong
and you were too busy
even to notice.
Bless the now,
the noticing.
4. CARAPACE
It is interesting, isn’t it
her husband says,
the architecture of the snow.
She looks out the window.
The car wears a carapace,
a wimple, a chador.
She chooses “carapace,”
sees the turtle pull his head
back under his protection.
She watches
as her husband moves away
from the window.
He takes his poem,
the one he will not write,
with him.
5. WEIGHT
Who can describe the weight of love?
Late we learn how heavy
When grief is the flood we float above
And love is the break in the levee.
And who can take the measure of love?
How wide it is, or how narrow
When hope is the breath of the mourning dove
And death is the quiver and arrow.
6. COME TO BED
Come naked into bed, my love—
I will tell you with my body
what your body can understand
even here, where your mind
slips on the slope of forgetting.
Loss is a complicated giver.
It comes, offering relief
like a lover dressed to kill
and it will. It will.
Thief, beggar, need supplicant,
whatever, this loss’s lips
are fresh-wound red.
Come to bed.
The gift it gives us
we would never choose—
this naked understanding:
how much we have
to lose.
7. AFTER TELLING YOU “I NEED RESPITE”
I dreamed myself on my hands and knees
on a long, long hill of dung.
It was dried, mountains of it.
I was no longer young.
Dung as far as the eye could see,
peak after peak to the sky
and I was on my hands and knees
and I did not know why.
There was a door behind me
and a doorstep, but no wall.
I have dreamed that door before,
just a door. No house at all.
A voice spoke: There is treasure.
But all that I could find
was broken glass and danger,
although the voice was kind.
And then that dreaming disappeared.
I watched explosions in the sky
of fire, body parts and blood.
Faces on fire, and I
woke up and turned myself to you
sleeping next to me
and tried to sort out what was dream
and what was prophesy.
8. BROKEN
Midnight, and the pain is gone
but the ghost of pain rattles
at the windows of the mind.
How can it be that we
are blind to love. Above
the rafters, the ever-afters,
we remember who we might have been
when the house of our inheritance
caves in
9. YESTERDAY, WHEN YOU FORGOT . . .
I felt a slam of anger,
fog
hardening to ice,
cold, heavy,
yet I would not
could not
did not in the least desire
to escape.
I wore it, anger,
like a finest fur coat
in a season when fur
is out of season—
immoral, bad taste,
dangerous to the world
of diminishing animals.
It is your animal self
that is diminishing,
and I am helpless
to find you
in this jungle
of falling trees.
The voice in me that needs
to comfort you, comfort me,
turned toward hibernation
until I had nothing
but a howl.
I curled to fetal,
hungered for a cave
so dark I could no longer see
what is becoming you and me.
What is becoming you
is disappearance,
and I am unbecoming me.
Anger felt solid, bold, numb,
as if it might hold me some
where.
10. PRAYER
Mystery for whom I have no name
because all names collide, divide,
diminish,
help me.
I go down on my metaphoric knees
as I push and pull my pen
along these dim blue lines.
I feel the dust of the earth in my mouth.
I am a beggar with a tin cup.
There is a place beyond a poem—
beyond naming, beyond claiming
any righteousness or craft,
where I have nothing left
but one word: Please.
11. ALONE
I’m already alone.
What’s known to me
can’t be
known to you.
I must protect you
from yourself.
But I can’t know
how far you go
protecting me.
And so
it may be that we
are each already alone.
12. OLD LOVE
Old love is a ripe persimmon
on a wild persimmon tree.
Love, we are old, have you noticed—
you, and me?
And our love is old, and sweet and ripe
on the tip of the lover’s tongue.
Remember, love, the bitter sting
Sometimes, when we were young?
But now we have ripened, round and full
of golden sweetness, golden sun,
and we look with surprise at each other:
You are the one.
You are the one, beloved,
we say. Don’t fear the flight.
We’re just taking the seeds of this sweetness
back to the earth’s good night.
13. FOR THIS
It is for this
we have been torn
and mended
and torn again.
This glad rag of my old body
almost every night
pulls itself across a white expanse of sheet
into your arms.
After harms and threats of harms,
alarms on the evening news,
we bear the bruise of knowing
this world that we love
will not be ours to mend.
We bend our bodies into one
and ride the world once more
around the sun.
From The Weight of Love (Negative Capability Press, 2019) by Pat Schneider. Copyright © 2019 by Pat Schneider. Used with the permission of the Estate of Pat Schneider.