Chain of Being


The carnivores and predators have top billing,
but in the subtle chain of species, the mussel
of the salt-water marshes invites admiration.
As marsh grasses are swept to sea, decomposing
and filling the water with phosphorus slurries,

our humble mussel begins to work. Three days
pass. The iron-rich phosphorous compounds
have now been filtered, firmly placed in a marl,
to be by mud–feeders released to planktons, who

will spoonfeed the fishes whose droppings sustain
the cord grass Spartina, who will again be compelled
to sweep to sea on the rigorous tide, releasing
fresh billows of self-shining phosphorous (from Latin:
torchbearer, bringer of light, the morning star.)

For diligence and distinction in this cycle,
for ceaseless, selfless action over millennia,
what commendation for the quiet mussel?
Constant of the intertidal realm; keeper
of balance for a planet of the Milky Way;

principal in the chain of beings who store
the carbon of civilizations, billions of tons,  
in the deep abyssal floor. Who has done more?
What possible honor — Palm d’Or, Nobel, Chevalier —
can we bestow on the mussel of the marshes?

First published in Southwest Review, as “Chain of Species,” and in Ars Poetica, from Peregrine Smith Books; revised 2024

Travel Slides


And this is the sage–silver-green of live oaks who shade
the chaparral, and this the dull, pea–green of shaggy tamarisk,
and this is the pine whose resin once clung to our duffels,
and these are the jade green bones found deep in the flesh
of a fish. And this is the man who asked: “What possible meaning
has hidden beauty in the struggle for existence?”

And this is the coral that mimics the mossy antlers of elk,
and this is the convolute coral named, you will guess, for the brain.
And this is a picture of us, in one of those fields where, betimes,
we find an iron gate standing free where some road program failed. 
And this — this is upside down — can you tell it is the marketplace?

The oranges and egg breads are local; most everything else
imported in tins and frozen blocks to this sunny principality of cane.
And this is the sea cliff path, a baking reach where the lava basalt
grated our feet (we should have worn shoes), where fantastic forms
appear: here the head of a seal, here a window made by the sea to itself. 

How rough the lava grows. We should have worn shoes.
And what rubes we must look, as we wince and gingerly probe,
to the snails — that stream of phosphorescent dots —
who are crossing on the softest foot, from one tide pool to another 
without complaint — and to the sea with its high threshold of pain.

First published in The New Yorker, August 1995; revised slightly, 2024

The man referred to on line 5 is Marston Bates, and the question is adapted from this passage in The Forest and the Sea: "This theory gains plausibility when, on a Pacific atoll, you have opened a parrot fish just roasted over coals from coconut husks, and find, not prosaic fish bones, but delicate bits of jade green embedded in the white flesh. What possible meaning can this have in terms of the struggle for existence." 

Keeping Time


During that season, I stopped wearing a watch
and started keeping time in another way,
more like the hours that sink around a pond.
And here too, where having stood near
this credenza on several thousand days,
I’ll say this, that love is more lovely over time.

For the noble schools that honor the present
moment, all respect; but the here is now
and then, and see what comes into the present:
this worn bandana is fragrant of pine,
of your neck and my neck, smoke,
leaves, and dazzled rocks in streams.

blinking pink eyes on each new moment,
astonished at the rough concrete ledge,
even at our own coo and bill?
The heart happens like a canyon, worn
breathtaking by a river at turns
a rushing course, at turns a silver wander.

Now and then I roam this precinct thinking:
"Where did I stand when he brought this
flowering plant? Was I wearing a dress?
Was the light orange-red or was the shade
red-orange," and did I say, "How did you
find the time; how beautiful the crusted snow
and here inside, these dark shining leaves.

First published in Green (Graywolf Press, 1989); revised 2024

This is Something Simple


This is something simple — tangerine peels
shredded on the counter like rocking saucers
with butter-white insides and bits of string.
But for some peculiar reason the skins
remind me of Handel speaking of his Messiah:
"I did think I did see all Heaven before me."
These peels are the shavings of Heaven,
certainly not the orchard agape with music
of spherical fruits, but still, real relics,
fragrant and recently of the garden.
I stare at them hard, up close, as though my eye
were to a keyhole. What could Handel have seen?

Perhaps what Dante saw in the blinding vision
of Paradise — light unfolding unto light —
and the one millisecond, as we might say,
of pure illumination. Or perhaps something
vast and geographical like the landscapes
of Frederick Church — a spectacle
of chasms and plateaus, and always a river,
a shining serpentine leading to... good lord,
even the needles on the promontory pines
are absolutely realistic, with flecks
of sunset on each tip. You have to admit
there is something appealing about a gigantic vision.

But sooner or later, the visions all go
to something so brilliant it can't be described, save
as blinding light, in hyperbole after hyperbole —
with cymbals, shrieks, and releases of doves.
And another thing — after the leavens of truth,
mystery remains, much the same as the anecdote
of the trolley and the village clock,
supposed to explain relativity, but itself
so mysterious as to require explanation.

Myself, I look at these peels and work from there.
Say these fruits and the television, the Rockies,
Hiroshima, Easter eggs, the constellation Orion,
and Peter finding arrowheads at the lake,
whooping at the luck of each sharp blue edge,
which he could hold in his hand easily
as lunch money — say all of it could be connected
by me or a greater mind — there, you'd have it.
These are pleasing skins. What nice, ruddy color.
Now they'll go in the compost, then to the garden,
and tomatoes will grow next year if the Spring isn't wet.

First published in The Hudson Review, 1987

Thought experiment for A and B


In the museum, the model brain was blue,
with two molded lobes that swiveled on
sweet brass hinges, akin to geodes in
the Hall of Gems — all in all a beauty

for shape and the finely wrinkled surfaces.
But in time we knew that the living brain
is plasticity, making, and remaking,
a lifetime of emergence and distillation.

And that here, thought experiments can be formed.
In this one, a pair of entangled photons — A
and B — are far away from one another,
as far away as the homeland in a ballad.

A now wanders the heavens, on Neptune, say,
or Andromeda, while B, floats in a glass
in the shady garden they once shared.
But if the spin of particle A is changed —

mark this wonder — the spin of B changes too.
Simultaneously! No time is needed for this change
in basic reality to travel the fathom of space.
The message leaps over all time and space.

And this is science, quantum’s uncanny rules.
And so it is, my dear one (oh love, where are you now?),
that we know, we know, that distance is moot:
that A and B are never apart, no never.

First published in Green (Graywolf Press,1988); revised 2024

On Nothing

The problem is the dissection problem.
Is it too much or too little love for the world
that moves one to despair in this life about
the despair of nothing after life, which this
life briefly — badly — interrupts?
It is true, that nothing is unfamiliar to us,
accustomed as we are to linoleum, wool snoods,
hands in pockets feeling the working hip bone.
But nothing is not despair, nor dark, nor pain;
it is none of these, and that is the point.
So if driven by fear of nothing, despair
is a simple mistake, a bit of a joke.

And what a waste of the gaping something to think
that because it is over soon, it is a groaning effort
to haul the sun each morning, to scurry around
a pyramid of footstools, improbable beings, frantic
as mimes to prop up marvels that wobble toward
drains or manholes. And too, it's unclear that eternity
has claim to meaning, or that if we had longer —
forever say — we could do better than we do
at five in a wagon, at eighty brushing the hair
from the forehead of a new youth. Eternity
seems an unlikely place to look for more.
Those twin prongs of before and after seem
merely to hold the middle ground like skewers
on summer corn so we may bring it tidily to our lips.
                                                                                          
In fact, we don't know that there is nothing.
All that we are and all that we aren't — it's not that.
The process of oceans grinding shells to sand
and sucking it back for bottom dwellers —
it's not even that. Zero is our invention,
an idea for which there is no evidence.
The great metaphor of empty space is false,
full of red suns rising in every direction.
A vacuum is light. A leg severed is memory.
A child unborn is aching regret or relief.
An accident avoided is a picnic by the road
with Dairy Queen burgers in thin tissue wrappings.

Except that we think of it, and on occasion,
groping for a nameless quarter, will feel the pull
of a thing beyond reckoning. But to think of it, even
to name it nameless means: that is not what we face.
Either our minds are famously unreliable
and we should get on with folding napkins and sheets
steaming from the iron, or our thoughts are not aliens,
rather emitted from nature like shad-roe, oxides,
uranium and burls. If so, these conceptual visions
of nothing, at which we excel, are pictures
of home, to be admired more stringently.

selected for Best America Poetry1990, edited by David Lehman and guest editor Jorie Graham
First published in The Hudson Review, 1989, revised slightly, 2024

Taking Pictures of Ducks


When the world was young
allusions were very popular
as when Dante plucked Odysseus
from gentleman farming on Ithaka
and sent him to Hades with other liars.

I need to talk to you that way
because Erasmus walks with me
this winter. He's never done that before.
We go along an icy river bank,
taking photographs of mallard ducks.

He's wearing a wonderful Dutch fur
and loves the meters on the camera.
The ducks address December en masse,
with eyes that bead from emerald heads
as tight and sleek as masquerade hoods.

Wise Erasmus, tell me this:
does the window of reason shutter the world?
Once soul was thought to emanate from the
pineal gland; now it has moved into the
spaces between everything in the universe.

That sounds like your old mystic enemies
and the whole court of darkness.
When I get the picture from the drugstore
it is clear: ducks on a bank,
neither preening, nor hungry.    

"But look," Erasums says, a quick study,
"at the edge of your picture, a blur."

First published in Green (Graywolf Press, 1989)

Earth's Answer                                          


Another night of Galileo arguing with William Blake —
the one with an angel in his tree, believing
"Where humans are not, nature is barren."
The other, il saggiotore, and curious Venetian,
pointing politely to his optical tube:
If the gentleman would look out the window,
at the three Moons of Ellipses . . .
No more sleeping this night, so rising I struggle with bards. 

One heard the furnace, Orc-rending an ocean,
all Beulah weeping. And one saw the revolution. 
Long has creation been taken as that live tongue,
telling in crumbling ores and recumbent folds,
in fugitive colors and the long clear combs of the sea. 
The world’s plenum, indifferent as it may be, sounds
as siren and provocateur on the drum of our whorled ears,
down dainty canals made by thunder and sighs.

Yet loosed as we are from the eerie circuitry of ants,
we wander, and wandering weave a connective tissue.
Even Galileo's descendants, in the deep sweet dream
of objectivity weave — as once a physicist,
dismissing metaphor and all its errancy, said,
by way of illustration: "The planet is only
a tennis ball, with a bit of fuzz for life.”
I did not chortle, I did not mock, I sympathized.   

Numberless, the natures of a world that keeps faith
and does the astronomer's will as well.
As first light comes, the mortar and pestle on my sill
grow red in the sun, burning as the need to know.
The colors look ripe to be taken, and I could use that red,
that unhurried crimson, salmon, sanguine bloom.
Only lead us not, we pray, into petty thieving.

first published in The Carolina Quarterly, 1989; revised 2024

Regional Airport
flying from Tuscaloosa to Boston


The terminal has twenty molded, plastic seats
and a mural that peddles the whole magical system:
flight lines as urgent as the marks of Lascaux — 
crisscrossing the country over which levitation will happen,
an enormous cat's cradle spanning from sea to sea.
The air outside is clear but for a harrier hawk
making lazy circles in the sky: We know we belong
to the land, and the land...

As our flight lifts, the plowing commences below
for corn and okra, that curious crop with curved
green seedpods pointing skyward, ladies fingers,
so called. From this bird's-eye on high I see,
we all see, how the land recedes into shapes:
first the big agricultural patchwork,
then commemorative stamps,
then a weightless idea above the clouds.

Wings fly in the cabin.
Men and women wear jackets with wings.
Soon I drink from a wingéd cup,
eat with a wingéd fork and spoon,
call a woman with wings on her suit,
press a wingéd napkin to my mouth.
Aloft along one of the lines rising, rising
like a home run going going over the fence
and out of the Black Warrior watershed.

In that harrowed place, a red acre
will bear a body on its earthly rounds.
There is a stand of olive trees, trundled as slips
from dry Demopolis (near Eutaw), and beds
of our mothers' established vinca spreading
their constant tangle, defeating erosion, dark
and flowering by season. There scuppernongs
last bloomed and splayed an obscure aristocracy
in the sun. A woman long dead was a child in their
shade, and she the soft-armed ruler of memory.

In the shining city where this flight will land,
untold souls have arrived from afar, have trembled
in new rooms when quakes roll from the blue hills
into this good city’s glacial bowl. With every flight,
did they pray that other lands, voices, scents,
selves, need never end, even as fresh balms come,
as they do, to appease the long leave-takings.

First appeared in The Atlantic,1988, revised 2024

Tall Order
bricolage


Dressed as an inspector, revealing clues
on the first fully modern campaign, the issue
is nourishment, and the irony of an attempt
to warm well-springs of joy with salvos
at the flaws of the only known world.
The ancient words are plain enough:
we are to become as little children.
This tall order and the nature of the effort
resemble the work of a sheltered person,
who turned to largely private ends,
who has seen at last that the price
of safety, of normality, is surely a mistake.
Roughly speaking, a person now
pressing on the doors of authenticity,
which, after something of a mystery,
bolder than the last and, in its sweep,
laying bare self-deception, may be found.
When one seeks to describe what has
happened, no names are used, and
halfway across the river, under pale skies,
we dare to whisper to one another
that honeyed phrase: a new life.

first published in Green (Graywolf Press,1989); revised 2024
Bricolage combining fragments from conversations and notes, and scattered phrases in The New York Times Books Review

Story
bricolage

In the American parlor, a momentary nostalgia
for old homes bright with detailed objects
and words adequate to represent the interior:
screen, chaise, keys in place, devotion,
a modest reserve, the meaning-giving law.
Now, with avalanches of information,
we must set forth for shelter, human shape,
safety, eye contact, purpose, and pantries.
Hopelessly removed from the prime object,
we must interpret weak signals from
whatever nature throws our way, and less
than fully controlled, in a system embedded
in a system, discern the way of the world.

There’s an even more ancient story: of flecks
of clay in the estuaries of an evolving earth
where life as we know it today rose to more
hospitable planes, raining down from time
to time, causing delight in our ranks.
When we tell the stories, we are fighting
for our lives, and in the break and tide
of rhythm, the pulling for breath and cries
of words leaping to sensibility, may begin
to take on form — as when a city is founded
and a quarter, a portion, is allotted to promise.
What harm to thrill to sudden cloudbursts,
the utmost pressure for fresh meaning?

First published in Green (Graywolf Press,1989); revised 2024
Bricolage combining fragments from notes and conversations, and scattered phrases in The New York Times Book Review

Acknowledgments

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following editors and publishers in whose publications many of these poems first appeared, often in earlier versions.

The Atlantic, Peter Davison, and David Barber, poetry editors
Carolina Quarterly
Graywolf Press, National Poetry Award publication, selected by Jorie Graham
The Georgia Review, Stanley W. Lindberg, editor between1977-2000
The Hudson Review, Paula Deitz, editor-in-chief
Milkweed Editions, several volumes edited by Laure-Anne Bosselaar
The Nation, Katrina vanden Heuvel, editorial director, publisher
New South Books, a volume edited by Jennifer Horne
The New Yorker, poetry editor Alice Quinn
The New York Times, Op-Ed Page, assigning editor David Shipley
Partisan Review, Rosanna Warren, edition editor
Prairie Schooner
Southwest Review, Willard Spiegelman, editor emeritus
Verse, Bonnie Costello, edition editor
University Press of New England, Deborah DeNicola, volume editor

Collected Reviews