The stars now rearrange themselves above you but to no effect. Tonight, only for tonight, their powers lapse, and you must look toward earth. There will be no comets now, no pointing star to lead where you know you must go.
Look for smaller signs instead, the fine disturbances of ordered things when suddenly the rhythms of your expectation break and in a moment’s pause another world reveals itself behind the ordinary.
And one small detail out of place will be enough to let you know: a missing ring, a breath, a footfall or a sudden breeze, a crack of light beneath a darkened door.
Words From the book “Interrogations at Noon”
The world does not need words. It articulates itself in sunlight, leaves, and shadows. The stones on the path are no less real for lying uncatalogued and uncounted. The fluent leaves speak only the dialect of pure being. The kiss is still fully itself though no words were spoken.
And one word transforms it into something less or other— illicit, chaste, perfunctory, conjugal, covert. Even calling it a kiss betrays the fluster of hands glancing the skin or gripping a shoulder, the slow arching of neck or knee, the silent touching of tongues.
Yet the stones remain less real to those who cannot name them, or read the mute syllables graven in silica. To see a red stone is less than seeing it as jasper— metamorphic quartz, cousin to the flint the Kiowa carved as arrowheads. To name is to know and remember.
The sunlight needs no praise piercing the rainclouds, painting the rocks and leaves with light, then dissolving each lucent droplet back into the clouds that engendered it. The daylight needs no praise, and so we praise it always— greater than ourselves and all the airy words we summon.
Summer Storm From the book “Interrogations at Noon”
We stood on the rented patio While the party went on inside. You knew the groom from college. I was a friend of the bride.
We hugged the brownstone wall behind us To keep our dress clothes dry And watched the sudden summer storm Floodlit against the sky.
The rain was like a waterfall Of brilliant beaded light, Cool and silent as the stars The storm hid from the night.
To my surprise, you took my arm— A gesture you didn’t explain— And we spoke in whispers, as if we two Might imitate the rain.
Then suddenly the storm receded As swiftly as it came. The doors behind us opened up. The hostess called your name.
I watched you merge into the group, Aloof and yet polite. We didn’t speak another word Except to say good-night.
Why does that evening’s memory Return with this night’s storm— A party twenty years ago, Its disappointments warm?
There are so many might-have-beens, What-ifs that won’t stay buried, Other cities, other jobs, Strangers we might have married.
And memory insists on pining For places it never went, As if life would be happier Just by being different.
Unsaid From the book “Interrogations at Noon”
So much of what we live goes on inside— The diaries of grief, the tongue-tied aches Of unacknowledged love are no less real For having passed unsaid. What we conceal Is always more than what we dare confide. Think of the letters that we write our dead.
