A Memory of the Future Read online

know they are remembered. Light like water.

  Tears run down chilly cheeks.

  But what do tears mean? Tears are not words,

  but tears can speak of things not easily spoken of.

  The winter was unending, all void and impasse.

  No corpse believes in spring.

  Thirst was ever-present, but the word for thirst was gone.

  But today the children on the playground

  fling off their heavy coats. They run through walls

  of light as if through waves at a far-off seashore.

  They shout. Their voices come and go.

  Light like water. The sparrows peck the seeds I scatter

  and wait, as we all do, for more. We all want more.

  Face upturned to the sun, eyes closed,

  like someone very old (how old am I?),

  I drink it in. Light like water.

  Stunned by it all, I say

  the words over and over

  and step into the light again.

  They Drive Through Childhood in Their Little Cars

  Loving them, we love nothing, no one,

  if not change, as they drive through childhood

  in their little cars, steering so seriously into the future

  while we follow a few steps behind, tripping through

  days and weeks and years, watching as they

  suddenly speed up, without a glance backward,

  without waving goodbye.

  Not to grow older! Not to grow up!

  Once, safe in my kingdom of cocoa, I wished

  for that, but years pushed me roughly out the door.

  I drove away in my little silver car, gripping

  the wheel too tightly, steering so seriously

  into the future, without a glance backward,

  without saying goodbye.

  Older now, we know, if we know nothing else,

  that we love them as they were, and are,

  though what they are keeps changing. We can’t keep up.

  How seriously they pedal their little cars into a future

  we won’t be part of. In a moment, a turn ahead

  will take them out of sight as we follow, follow for dear life,

  practicing our goodbyes.

  The Amiable Child

  ERECTED TO THE MEMORY

  OF AN AMIABLE CHILD,

  ST. CLAIRE POLLOCK,

  DIED 15 JULY 1797

  IN THE FIFTH YEAR OF HIS AGE.

  private gravesite in Riverside Park, Manhattan

  Not a bad place, this. Someone has planted bulbs.

  The daffodils are up and spiky blue and purple hyacinth.

  Smaller, humbler violets lie low to the ground.

  The buds on the overhanging trees are poised

  and ready, a green that will deepen as the weeks go on.

  Small birds resist a formal gathering, perch

  on trembling branches to ask, Who’s here?

  but nobody answers. No, nothing remarkable,

  just a child’s grave on the cliffs above the river.

  It happened on a morning in July.

  A small boy running across a long lawn, his shadow

  hurrying him on, matching him stride for stride,

  pulling him closer, ever closer, to the shining river.

  An exclamation of joy, joy and then surprise as his foot

  met the cliff’s edge, a small life tripping, slipping

  so easily into death . . .

  I keep coming back. I don’t know why.

  I have cleared away dead leaves, reaching as far

  as I can reach into enclosed and sacred space,

  waiting without knowing what I wait for.

  These commonplace flowers? These particular

  birds, alert and quick to the moment?

  If he inhabits this place, these woods (he does),

  he would notice everything.

  A child, it was written, amiable to the end.

  March: St. John the Divine

  New York

  At noon, just as the bells began to ring,

  the white peacock spread its rippling tail, the sound

  like a sibilant wind rushing through many leaves.

  Three of us watched. A dark-haired woman clapped

  at the spectacle, and a Spanish man asked for the name

  in my language, then held out his arms and said, “I love you.”

  The peacock turned full circle, then turned again.

  It arched its head and cried, cried out, waiting

  for an answering cry. But no cry came.

  These Lenten weeks are wordless, gray, and slow.

  One waits for a sign that never comes, and then it does.

  While out on Amsterdam the traffic never slowed,

  and people on the sidewalk, each alone,

  hurried to wherever it was they were going,

  not paying attention, just talking on their phones.

  The Streaming

  MASSACRE in bold headlines as you walk into the coffee shop.

  The news. Constantly streaming. Finding you wherever you are:

  At home. In the car. In the grocery store or running in an endless loop

  high above Times Square. The not-looking at what screams to be

  looked at: the missing ones, the dead, the fires and the bombings,

  everything ravaged, burned, cracking in a godless desert heat.

  Or closer, moving closer in. On the streets, the homeless,

  so many of them, hands held out. A dollar changing hands.

  Or, the turning away. The refusal. The hardening as more and more

  hold out their hands. The mail. The solicitations. A voice asking you to give,

  please, won’t you give more? And everywhere the ringing of the phones.

  On trains. In waiting rooms. At parties. Weddings. Funerals.

  And once, during the third act of a play, an actor alone on the stage,

  head bowed, waiting in fury for the endless ringing to end.

  Voices saying: I can’t talk to you now. Or talking on and on.

  And you hearing every word: I am in Baltimore. L.A. Spokane. New York.

  I don’t know where I am. I just had lunch. I am getting on the plane.

  I will see you tonight. Or, Not tonight. Not ever again.

  The needing-cessation but nothing ever ceasing. The wanting

  to scream but not screaming. But today, a space of silence

  in a church where figures kneel and pray their pain may cease:

  Lord, take away the pain. Among flickering candles, they pray.

  Shattered. Shattered by a ringing phone. But still you pray.

  Leaving, you pass a girl standing in the shadowed nave.

  Holding a book bag tightly to her chest. As if it were a shield.

  Two words on it, only two words: STAY HUMAN.

  Pigeon 7 A.M.

  Flutter and flurry of wings, the spirit descends

  outside a window on the Upper East Side.

  Gray note on a gray scale,

  the same sound over and over:

  ooo oooooo ooo

  Me here. You there.

  Apprehended but unseen.

  There, on the other side of the window.

  You are Presence. You are Companionship

  without the burden of speaking.

  O Great Consoler, I listen in silence

  as you have always listened in silence.

  How can I accept your silence?

  Forgive you your silence?

  I forgive you because the spirit

  (which is and is not You) is crying:

  ooo oooooo ooo

  You are so often silent.

  But the creature outside the window,

  holy or unholy, is not silent. No.

  It repeats to whoever will listen:

  Not alone. No.

  If it left, if You left, what then?

  All over the city, the spirit
,

  making the selfsame sound, descends.

  On Riverside Drive

  This statue depicts Shinran Shonin (1173–1262) as he appeared propagating the teaching. The statue originally stood in Hiroshima 2.5 kilometers northwest from the center of the first atomic bomb attack. Having survived the full force of the bomb, the statue was brought to New York in 1955 . . .

  THE NEW YORK BUDDHIST CHURCH

  What is devotion?

  These roses left at your feet by a passing pilgrim?

  This walk I take each morning where I pause

  for a moment, stare up at you

  in your missionary’s hat and robes,

  and offer a silent greeting?

  In this wind, waves on the river

  ripple backward to their source.

  The infolded petals of the rose bend

  backward as clouds stream overhead.

  The traffic on the parkway streams.

  Day and night, it streams without meaning.

  And the pilgrim, without thinking, retraces

  her steps, rising, moving, coming back,

  each day an act of devotion.

  As a young man, you practiced the austerities.

  But after twenty years you turned

  from renunciation to find, in not seeking,

  what you sought. Centuries passed.

  Your followers cast you in bronze.

  You witnessed devastation.

  Now pilgrims half a world away

  leave roses at your feet.

  How wordlessly you stand here,

  always the same, never the same.

  Your gaze takes in some middle ground

  I try to live in.

  Again I ask, what is devotion?

  And again you do not answer.

  But no answer is my answer

  for today. As I pass on.

  Small as a Seed

  In despair, do not despair.

  KARL RAHNER

  In everything, its opposite.

  In terror, calm.

  In joy, attendant sorrow.

  In the sun’s ascendancy, its downfall.

  In darkness, light not yet apprehended.

  At night in bed, I fear the falling off.

  Though falling, I will rise.

  I fear. Fall arriving now.

  In any word so small, the world.

  In the world I walk in, a wild wood.

  She Leans

  after a photograph by A. Aubrey Bodine

  A house: scoured and scarred by wind, its unpainted

  boards aligned in contrasting verticals of dark and light,

  with a chimney that leans a little as the house leans.

  Four broken-out windows on facing sides

  allow a bird, many birds, to fly easily in and out,

  like a mind in the midst of its own vacancy, trying

  and failing to hold onto its own rapid, chattering thoughts.

  A house unto itself that leans but does not fall.

  Being but never doing (is being enough?),

  storied and memoried (or has it forgotten everything?),

  does it wonder why that florid, overdramatic sky

  can never make up its mind what it wants to do?

  Or what happens to those pink and purple clouds

  when they drop over the razor-thin horizon?

  Taking it all in, coming back to it day after day,

  moving toward it and then moving away, walking

  in cautious clockwise circles around it, then walking

  widdershins, peering curiously into its endless gloom,

  stepping over the doorframe into a perfectly empty room

  (no, not empty, there’s a curling calendar from 1952),

  do you think it has nothing to do with you? Do you?

  Island Graveyard

  Deer Isle, Maine

  —An inchworm inches across a broken marker

  where two families, eight in all, have kept each other company

  for a long time, their family plot no bigger than a bedroom,

  fenced in by ancient pine trees that give a little shade

  and keep out rain. A rusty gate that hangs half off its hinges,

  and looks exactly like the headboard of a bed, admits

  whoever comes without discrimination, though visitors are rare

  in a place where death is writ in lowercase, part of a landscape

  of fallen trees gone soft, of lichens bleaching to white,

  of old-man’s-beard hanging like fancy lacework from all

  the trees, swaying whenever the wind blows, but today is still.

  Their century gone, they lie here and lie here and lie here,

  the Billings and the Toothakers—Hattie and David and Mellie,

  Melvina and William and Angenett and Lucy and John.

  The day is hot, the ground is cool and spongy, and it would be

  easy, easy but not wise, to lie down for a moment among them,

  the swollen ground my pillow, and wake with a start to nightfall,

  the owl alive and hunting, darkness over all . . .

  Crow calls to crow,

  summoning me back from a place that is not a place at all,

  and little by little, the inchworm, better than clock or sundial,

  traverses the mossy stones, gathering itself into a ,

  then flattening into a line, as if to mend a thread that keeps

  unraveling and shape the story into beginning, middle, end.

  Someday you and I will lie formal and lofty in a grave,

  the way that speechless effigies of kings and queens

  are laid out, side by side, in dim cathedrals for pilgrims

  to touch and wonder at. In chaste repose, no longer

  will we feel the press of time pour madly through our fingers,

  too fast, too fast! What will we feel then, if we feel at all?

  Grave tenderness toward a world that goes on easily without us?

  Or will the bodiless part of ourselves escape and spread

  like smoke until we’re nowhere and everywhere at once,

  a dispassionate blue curve above a curving planet, like a lens

  fitted to an eye that cannot close, that sees too much, sees

  more than it wants to see. Crow and cicada won’t tell me

  what I need to know. Hattie and David and Mellie won’t tell me.

  And so I read their names the way the inchworm does, by touch,

  lichen and moss cool against my cheek, green crumbling tendrils

  waiting to break me down so slowly I won’t even know.

  This is as good a place as any to be buried, here on an island

  caught in a pocket of time, where fog obscures the morning

  until the sun breaks through, and the sound of the ocean breaking

  against rock draws us farther than we intended until we stand

  at water’s edge and can go no farther, or going farther say goodbye

  to everything we know. Practiced in our farewells, we’ll leave

  the dead to murmuring posthumous conversations where

  racing seasons and constellations figure, where centuries

  pass like days and days like centuries, as we retrace our steps

  on a path veined and gnarled as an old man’s face —

  Something is creeping up my arm!

  An inchworm on my sleeve measuring me for new clothes.

  Magicicada

  name for the seventeen-year cicada

  Lord, when I am taken, will they put me in the ground?

  Will I dream the Eternity Dream over and over,

  I who am so alone?

  Perfectly dead, will I be an I then?

  Will I welcome holy darkness or wait in vain

  for light to strike my face and warm it?

  And will I apprehend familiar or unfamiliar footsteps

  treading above me on hallowed ground?

  *** />
  I remember when the cicadas came.

  We had been warned but no warning

  could prepare us for the tens of thousands

  tunneling upward, emerging from hard shells,

  their bulging eyes bright red, their bodies black.

  Stunned by light and time, at first they made no sound.

  Then, wings unfolding, they rose and joined

  the humming swarm. For weeks they sang.

  Their song was not a song we knew.

  It filled the days and nights unceasing.

  It was not human. And then it stopped.

  They left gold carapaces behind.

  They left a silence in the mind

  that deepens as the years go on.

  ***

  Seventeen years!

  Deep in the earth there is no ticking time.

  They sleep like tiny gods below us,

  blind, sucking on roots, as we continue on,

  careless and preoccupied. Sweeping them up,

  I marveled they were ever here

  and wondered, as I do now,

  Will I see them again? Will I?

  Gold Bug

  Under the chair:

  old poems that scroll

  back through the years.

  Down on my knees, I dig

  through drafts of past lives.

  Something’s alive!

  Smaller than an o,

  a tiny beetle quietly

  lives there among words.

  The room is dry

  as a bone, with no

  stray crumb to feast on.

  So, scarab, how do you survive?

  Yes, that is the question.

  How to go on.

  My breath, measured

  and careful, blows you gently

  off the page to land

  on the swirling patterned carpet.

  Gold on gold now.

  Where you continue.

  You can dive into the past and emerge into the future.

  HUAIYEN

  The Shrine

  I was taken undergrounddown many flights of stairs