One Single Impression: Doorways

Dark and dust here, light and breath there.
How many years to cross this portal
To get there?
Too many or none.
Call me. I come.

One Single Impression

One Single Impression: Melody

One bird after another
Joins his song to the melody of dawn
The sky harmonizes in blue.

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One Single Impression: Impermanence

New and dappled at dawn
The fawn awaits the doe
At noon he will stand.

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One Single Impression: Pets

This is an oldie that I wrote for my beloved pup, Cuchulainn. He came to me when I lived in Belfast in the 1990s. He never left.

Cuchulainn

Your eyes close off
the fireplace, the lights, and me
as you rest your head heavily on my thigh;
your big, black paw, on my knee.

Will your sleeping mind's eye,
the record-keeper of every sound and smell of time,
recall our ancestors' meeting--
the treaty between people and the wild--
when you first came to the fire?

What were the terms of domestication?

Who growled at whom?
Did you take the best place by the fire then, too,
or did you earn it by degrees?
What did they and you expect those early nights
of our good posture?

We lost all sense of outdoors with your coming in.

You who would be known to every living thing by your
smell, sound, and sight will not share the knowledge
your fine nose finds in our leaves, rocks, and trees.

Nor do we understand the crooked paths you take,
The invisible potions in which you roll your delighted body,
Or the back-scratching pine trees that keep your toys.

Keeper of ancient secrets, you let us go on in our building of fires.

We give your our own bed, too,
Though you would take it, anyway.

Through you we glimpse the world with our kindest vocabulary:

Puppy, pet, protector, friend.

I feel it in my thigh.

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Immigrants

“They are ancient beings,
And they deserve to live,
I think.”

Teenagers slowed enough
So that we could see them roll their eyes
At our softness and sentimentality

Because we were in their way

Standing over a snapping turtle
Paused at a bend in the road
Running perilously through the
Saugatuck Reservoir.

How could we move him?

We tried with a stick
But no stick would rush this ancient being
As old as the rocks,
Timeless as the mud and mulch caked
On its barnacled back and feet paddling
The air like water.

What to do?
I picked up the snapping turtle
Whose four feet padded the air like water
And who craned his neck round to snap.

There was no sound, no clutch,
No fear.
The turtle must cross the road,
And who has time for fear?

Down on the black sponge of rotted leaves and needles
I placed the turtle
Facing the stream and the mud
That surely the turtle must want and

The sun shone hot on our backs—
Mine and the immigrant woman
Whose flailing arms in the road stopped me
Before I could see the ancient being crossing the tarmac.

It stopped
And turned round to face us
With a wide-open mouth like a baby
Searching in the dark for its mother’s breast
In the near satisfaction
That precedes deep sleep.

One Single Impression: Freedom

Cloud and shadow rise
In a single, silent spirit--
Fish learn the freedom of flight.

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