Clouds Clearing Over Delft (After Jan Vermeer)

The winter of 1995-6 the National Gallery of Art hosted the amazing, wondrous Johannes Vermeer exhibit; I remember waiting in line in the cold, during the government shutdown (after the Republican Congress and then-President Clinton couldn't agree on a budget). I started this not long after, finished it much later, in unrhymed 11-syllable lines.

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Clouds Clearing Over Delft (After Jan Vermeer)

You come as you come to any painting first
with a gift to leave outside the frame – a loop
of string, two coins, half of a tale overheard
this morning on the train – as you come newly
into a city holding tight the useless
and precious alike, yet unknowing the one
from the other – guidebook and well-twisted map
you struggle to match with unmarked streets that turn
to blind alleys or vistas to stop your throat.

Knowing enough to tell right from left, to know
the sea by the taste of the wind at sunset,
the green creaking weathercock coming about.
Enough then to see it as a town and not
a half-chewed blur out the train window, a stack
of bricks piled against grey hills, the raw scrape
of the painter’s knife and its mathematics
balancing absorption and ungathered weft,

as the gleam of morning sun twice-reflected
off sea-water mist unhurriedly reveals
a mossy-hulled ship still asleep at anchor
in Delft harbor.
                             That view is no more, perhaps
was never. Timbers interpreted may sway
as much as tides or children. At your own
back some ship, not this ship; among your
habits some city, not this, never this light.

Coming back that night the same way you started,
you reproach yourself for missing it before:
a shop window spills gold and garlic butter
onto the sidewalk, then is banished, an abrupt
snap of a hidden switch. In the sudden cold,
you press your face against the window to see
yourself at dinner days away, severing
time and mussel shell; raise your glass and smile back.

Remember this in the exhibition hall,
as the press of viewers threatens your memory
with stories of breakfast and the government,
threatens what you would hold fast by your brochure.
Your tokens have been taken up in the flare
from Nieuwekerk's steeple, forging gold from lead,
lifting red earth to press back the sea. Now, as
the clouds give way to morning's uncovered head,

hoist up your basket. Look here, the day begins.

(Published Cream City Review, Vol. 29 no. 1, Spring 2005)

...Thunder Road...

Unpublished. I took a class with Henry Taylor at the Writer's Center back in 2000 and ended up writing a lot of rhyming and other formal verse. The bookstore in question is Second Story Books, in Rockville, MD. An unnecessary poem by any measure, except that it was sitting in the air waiting to be written. Or just watch this and think about being scared we ain't that young anymore...

Source: Victoria Belanger

On browsing in a used book store & finding most of the lyrics to “Thunder Road” inscribed on the inside cover of a 1977 Maryland high school yearbook

She turns & turning spins the air
to catch his words unbreathed, undrawn,
as Mary’s frozen bathtub stare
scours the polished suburban lawn.

Afternoon slants across the visitor
considered – borrowed car keys bite
his hand as Bruce sings out a passing car,
sings about a song on the radio: sit tight.

For who could always feel this way
(tell me you’ll never feel so bored) –
4 minutes 49 or all your life to stay
the sun’s flown arc on a spindle scored

by two dropping off the stack while I kept
on going, in quest of what comes after always:
to sweep & drink to remember having swept
away drink & desire as a passing phase –

but they’re still here down at the shore,
camped out in a shuttered summer house,
a flowered magnet on a cracked screen door
slapping vinyl siding – fried clams doused

in hot sauce & sand rest in the kitchenette,
for here no minutes tick & his shirt tail
will never be tucked, that cigarette
never smoked, PBR hasn’t gone upscale.

No way out but through, no way through
but to become, no pattern to become
but what is before them, true or untrue,
beyond hope the cake within the crumb.

Her hair would stream out behind her
even as she walked -- I grow old in
the recollection; she grows smaller
as a record erases itself with each spin,

as yearbook pages cling together
in ripening mildew & waterstain:
the taste of cold nostalgia warmed over.
On this flyleaf we’re sixteen again,

scouring lyric sheets for meaning
only we understood, decoding lines read
to say you are not alone in seeming
alone, the album split open on the bedspread

frozen in a pose we dreamed of living
then found no one could. I still miss you.
Come to your window: it’s me singing;
I need to believe you miss me too.

Sweet Lovin' Baby

Unpublished. The Museum of Natural History used to have honeypot ants in a display. The lyrics (italicized) are from Laura Nyro's "Sweet Lovin' Baby."

Source: Alex Wild Photography

Sweet Lovin’ Baby

Content could I be, is she, honeypot ant,
replete, a clinging chandelier
swollen with pleasures not her own,
condemned as she is to open her mouth with
the same sweet tale to all with spare change
& a soft antennae tickle there’s gold in you darling

On stray rained streets beggars’
change cups call up the damned
on their cellphones –
hell hath its own area code but spotty coverage
so they all shout at once
for what they have been starved of:

one last undulled desire
still clinging to their bones as ragged finery,
risen but risible,
a golden cup looted from the grave to hold
nickels & coffee;
their arms around me bend & beckon, ‘ahh hungry.’

‘Well what do you feel like’ I stall badly.
Their groans hesitate;
so turning who can follow much less return –
a hand may reach into a velvet pouch
to retrieve not gold but broken glass
where is the night luster

Death breaks up the call, comes swaggering
past the swaying bodies agape & blind.
Death always knows what he is having for lunch
& where.
I wave my arms desperate to tell
past my trials sparkling in flight

pale pathetic regret: I never saw
Laura Nyro’s Christmas show down at the Bottom Line
& now too late any times over too late.
Death’s eyes fall on me, empty
of mocking & pity both; he unfolds his hands
in a spill of shattered glass, says only
‘Open your mouth.’

In The Bleak Midwinter

Source: NOAA

Liz's grandfather worked the old codfishing schooner fleet out of Boston and Gloucester, Massachusetts, hauling lines in the little doryboats on what was once the richest fishing grounds in the world. There's video of Portugese dory fishermen here. The only deliberate falsehood I introduced is Liz's mother's birth order; she was next-to-youngest but that didn't scan. I shouldn't have changed it but there it is. Both her sister and she are gone now. There are lots of intimations of death here -- the sound of a churchbell heard in a boat, "the bed made long and narrow" which is the coffin from the old folksong "Barbara Allen."


The casting of flowers into Gloucester harbor to remember the dead is a real thing with a long history, as this article from 1903 shows and is also shown at the end of the film "Captains Courageous" from which the screenshot below is taken.

The title comes from Christina Rossetti's poem of course, and there are several settings of it into music; the one that mattered most to me was the Gustav Holst setting recorded by Jane Siberry, Mary Margaret O'Hara, Victoria Williams, Holly Cole and Rebecca Jenkins, which you can hear here. Jane also recorded it on her record, Child, which Jane provides on a pay-as-you-ought basis here. "Snow had fallen snow on snow..."

In the Bleak Midwinter

Two thousand hooks along each line, and hooked
On each a herring split by men who wrap
Their feet in newspapers first and then in socks.

Over the starboard side he drops to follow
His dorymate from the schooner down into
The waiting boat. Silent as salt the two row

Out into the waiting Georges Bank, gowned
By mist and the rising morning, snowflakes fall,
Rest for a moment, then drown.

He cranks the gurdy at the first trawl line –
The barbed cod rise wreathed in thrash and foam.
He cocks his head as though to listen.

The night before, he doesn’t know, his youngest
Woke after midnight to press her face
Against the windowpane, clouded by a gust

Of warm breath, her fingertips trace alive
A ship, the waves. You know he never learned
To swim, she will tell her own daughters, my wife.

On that night in her mind’s eye she saw people
Moving from the church, a lantern before his boat,
A light like a bell sounding softly in the steeple,

Calling Christmas is coming, is coming, while conch
Horns blew in the fog, as geese call to one another,
As gutted fish fall into the salthold, as a knock

Of hands on wood, the bed made long and narrow.
Such is faith. How easy it is to call on the god
Who leafs the daffodil, gives song to the sparrow.

But you are asked instead to praise the bloody knife,
To trust frail petals tossed into the harbor,
Step out, and walk across the water to your life.

(Published The Baltimore Review Vol. 8 no. 1, Winter/Spring 2004)

The Oystercatcher

I wrote this in Lewes, Delaware; from the ocean side of the beach you can see the container ships slowly turning to come into Delaware Bay, headed up to Philly. I shared the beach one morning with an oystercatcher; they look perpetually surprised, as though startled to remember that they are, indeed, a bird.

Source: Linda, Philly Bird Nerd

The Oystercatcher

The hidden channel turns each ship's flank
toward the beach by slow degree, undraping
the crated, uniform containered shape
that lay behind the horizon's smoky dot.
Quickly they slide off the stage when once
shown as they are. The oystercatcher and I
are left, eyeing one another with some
suspicion. He's come off the bar and waits
I guess for the tide to turn and open
up the oyster flat again. He knows
the beat, lives within patience standing
by the sullen oysters, waiting for their
inevitable gape, then swifter than his shape
twists the esoteric into guts and gullet.

(Published in Talking River Review, Winter 2001)

Estate Sales

I'm still not quite sure where this came from, the actual estate sale that prompted the thought was nothing like this. I do know I was writing a lot of sonnet-shaped poems then, not rhymed or rhythmed like a sonnet but 14 lines, usually with a six line tail or coda. "Mock sonnets" then, or "mockets."

Source: Mark Cassino

Estate Sales

We wandered by accident into an estate sale --
as gruesome as stumbling over someone else's
dead grandmother. Her hair curlers, votive shrine
to Our Lady of the Pine Barrens. Like a toe kicking
decalcified ribs. Too easy, you think: no other
tale can come from this. Yet from a picture she calls --
a grey-toned processed wave says then it was like this --
don't forget she laughs.
                                      Glad grasshoper loudness
of the field, you see us in our misapprehensions,
leaping to conclusions but falling short, falling.
In her yard I picked up a smooth grey stone to hold
for nervous rubbing: when they come to buy
my unburdened things, I hope some child will ask
what is this for? who would keep a rock?

(Published in The Cape Rock, vol. 32 no.2, Fall 1997)

Night Driving/Blue Moon

If I dedicated poems, I would have dedicated this one to Liz, and Cathy, and Yoshi; it's not specific to any one time or thing but is a composite of various times spent on Cape Cod, and the long drive home, wherever that might be.

Night Driving/Blue Moon

Your dozing silence speaks its familiarity;
the slow reversing drift of your neck reveals
more secrets than can be discovered in a week
at the beach, raking clams and counting
the waves as they break and scatter, to make sure
that time takes no holiday at the seagull's watch.
Out of the water the clamshells fade towards
dust and bone, the periwinkle snails shut tight.
The trucks that pass us bring the wind with them,
the close air of the dwarf scrub pine.
                                                        Last night
you offered to sing, finally, at the beach-fire.
"Blue Moon" came out, and I wondered where it had been,
the words a joint-legged creature buried in the sand
against the waves, without a dream of its own.

(Published in The Cape Rock vol. 32 no. 2, Fall 1997)

San Marco

I thought this was my first published poem, but looking again at the dates it appears to be the third after "Night Driving/Blue Moon" and "Estate Sales." No arguing with history. Maybe it was the first accepted. Wrote it, I know, in 1995, after spending a few short weeks in Italy after Liz finished at Michigan. Somewhere I think I even have a picture of those mosaiced birds.

photo by Dimitry B

San Marco

On the ceiling of San Marco's cathedral in Venice
two birds have inexplicably escaped from  the ark
mosaics in the other dome, a scattering of Genesis
loose in the city, or perhaps two wading birds

who have come in through the front doors
to be trapped in gold tiling by workmen. Storks
of some kind, or cranes. Odd of course that seabirds
might book passage on a boat. Not untoward

to ask, is it? Our Italian fades into Latin and then
into nothingness: Cette due aves, est...?
Let some mysteries rest.
                                      Meanwhile the screens
are up to keep out the now more famed pigeons,

memorialized daily in the shrieks of children
joyfully alarmed by whirling grey feathers
and beaks reaching for millet. Their fathers laugh
abashed, take photographs and years later

are unable to explain to neighbors why a
snapshot of a child in Venice reminds them of life
escaping unobserved from behind a half-open door.

(Published in Cold Mountain Review Vol. 26 No. 2, Spring 1998)

Unit (a first post)

Apparently I started a blog here seven years ago and never actually put anything into it. It's quite the different world since then.

One thing I've been meaning to do, though, is to find a place to stash my writing. So that's what this will be: an irregular chap book, a bit of this and that. Isn't it all, though.