The focal length is all wrong, I say
to the meteor shower.
Be calm, they say,
or the chimney swallows will steal
ember by ember
everything keeping you close to him
lying on the lawn, counting stars
shaken from the night’s branches
in summer storm.
I promise to pay the medical bill
for August’s sky: orbits of iron
pith & cloud-seed broken
against our atmosphere.
The telescope we built—
a cardboard tube, Teflon
& mirror—is a close for seeing
only what could have been,
can’t tell you anything
about this moment. Here, light
means destruction. A mattress
dragged across the wet field
means light. The swallows
ember in the chimney.
Lie still, the meteors say
above the apple’s barren
branches. Sometimes
the sky can only be torn apart
with the naked eye.
Of Lights that Go Before Men, and Follow Them Abroad In the Fields, by the Night Season, Colin Cheney (for 7/31)
Married, Jack Gilbert
I came back from the funeral and crawled
around the apartment, crying hard,
searching for my wife’s hair.
For two months got them from the drain,
from the vacuum cleaner, under the refrigerator,
and off the clothes in the closet.
But after other Japanese women came,
there was no way to be sure which were
hers, and I stopped. A year later,
repotting Michiko’s avocado, I find
a long black hair tangled in the dirt.
