Snow Globe

When you speak, a bell rings
In my spirit. When I walk
Into a crowded room, one word
From your lips hushes the din,

And I am standing alone as in
The center of a snow globe--
My world flips and a strange song
Filters through the foil snowflakes--

The edges of my world cupped in your palms
While I try to write the lyrics to this song.

Behold

Half a mile from Plymouth Rock,
The captain cuts the engine and directs
Our attention shoreward to behold
The fabled point of origin

Of our self-governance, but I,
Bitten by a summer laryngitis, drift
Outside the web of language where I do not miss
The ocean's churning underpinnings, which rock us,

Teach our knees how to bend and how to stand.
And as I scan the bottomless horizon
On my own, I alone bear witness
To a humpback whale breaching in the distance. 

I want to speak but cannot catch the moment
That the silence of true self-governance exposes.

Long Arms

At Charlotte Airport, waiting for my friend 
To go attend her father's funeral,
I meet a young man whose face shines
With anticipation above a huge bouquet of flowers

Which reach his eyes together with his smile.
He is waiting for his mother from Eritrea
Whom he hasn't seen in years while he has studied
In this tentative America.

I stay and take their photos- she descends
Wrapped in white, an apparition on the escalator,
And I recognize her by her love, which is 
Not in her but around her; it is so large

That I too feel wrapped in love's long arms
Which stretch like airplane routes around the globe,
Touch the silence of our dreams and reach
Just as impossibly down the long tunnel of memory

Into the silence of the grave and back.
I am ready now to go pay my respects.

The Crow

After the storm, I find you
Sitting on my driveway, still,
Eyes closed. Your kin fly away
As I approach, quietly--

I squat beside you, knowing
That you are in this world but
Briefly-- dissolving margins
Between earth, sky, and spirit--

One eye opens into mine
And in that stare, my mental 
Catalogue of the sunlight
Hitting earth from every angle

Opens in the air between
My skin, my hair, your feathers frail.
You read it line by line--
Perhaps we always shared it.

Your eye closes, you collapse--
Never more a part of earth,
And never more of air.

Silent Vigils

Late in the afternoon of this strange summer
That somehow belongs to me,
A circle of crows lights on a hay bail
Mere feet from their fallen brother,
One of his wings spread on the shoulder
Of the road that takes me home.
It is always the silent vigils that I notice.

I am at odd angles with this world,
Afraid of revolving hotel doors,
Never sure how to enter anywhere.
Life is a series of scenes that I happen upon,
Like the lights rising on a theater set
And I, in the dark, am moved
Only by the strange shared silence.

Before the Fall

September 10th of your seventy-first year
Finds me sitting by the picture window
Staring at the maple tree you planted
In the front yard and which served

As second base for kickball games
You never saw us play because
You always worked the  night shift 
And then slept all day,

Like you do now on the rented hospital bed
While family gathers round to lend
An air of festivity to this,
Your third to final Saturday.

You don't know what to say, and I
Don't either, so I make you chocolate milk
And cut the straw so you can
Reach it easier- just like you used to do for me.

And when you use it to blow bubbles
Pointlessly, we can't stop giggling, 
And this is the moment I accept
Your death and mine,

And the maple tree drops its first leaves
Of the season in a gust of wind
That rattles through the window pane,
Your glass half full of chocolate milk. 

Form & Substance

Spring buds on branches
Dance in the wind. Their shadows
Darken frosted grass. 

The sun wakes early.
A single drop of water 
Stands on a branch tip.

This is one haiku 
But it is three haikus too.
The drop has vanished.