The Amulet

The Amulet

I saw the child

search the rat’s corpse for bones

then work the ivory

into an objet d’art.

I bought it

not for his wonderful lies

about this artifact

a tourist should desire

nor the fact he was

inspired by starvation,

but for his utility in transformation,

his ability to work with what was there.

1974

When You Wait for Biopsy Results,

you hear the green buzz of life

you wear questions like coats hats gloves

you speak with a voice pitched too sharp

when you wait like that

your eyes do not really see the road

on the way to the clinic

when you wait in the lobby

you can't hold onto the magazine

you can't quite see the doctors

and when they tell you

words you knew they would say

in low voices like this

and you walk out to the car

and fall behind the wheel

you can't think of where to drive

you can't dream of where to live

1998

Water Passages (1993)

When I was young I fell in love with you,

and learned to chant, and learned to delete lines

best left unsaid. Teacher, the years swept by,

foaming and falling to the valley's floor.

I was a small stream bed that carried verse:

hiker's boots stepped over me and stayed dry.

But these currents carry your soft vespers

still, as well as songs from other creeks and springs.

Seventeen years the river took to grow

and flow past here, far from those headwaters.

That nascent inspiration, rivulet,

is as much the river of my days now,

Louise, as any major confluence

that floods the memories on to the gulf.

(In memoriam Louise Glück, 1943–2023)

Sudden

The meeting of cornfield

and river valley forms

a straight, fenced line

that we walked on evenings

for the sudden replications

of stars, and to talk

about distant city lights

that lit the sky north of Otho.

When you died I could not cry

for a time, but then your memory

caught me, and your fatherly

nod took me from a dark place:

as when we had walked, Papa,

suddenly to a great expanse

marked by a cardinal direction

and washed in tears and light.

1978