April Dusk, Wassergass
Dull pewter light on the pond
fringed
with the green shadows of trees
across the road,
the sky one big pewter cloud
it’s hard
to look straight into,
all that glare that says
there’s more light up there
than we can bear,
which makes me remember Matthew’s
The lamp of the body is the eye,
even as I feel mine burning,
spring allergies, I’d thought,
the pollen and dust,
the long days of sun holding on,
one minute more,
then another
till it’s eight o’clock,
my wife and I still out on the patio
with a little talk
as the darkness filters in,
taking
the spruce and fir and hemlock
then the barn,
then part
of her face turned up toward the hill,
her shoulder, arm, my leg, foot, bit
by bit
till we’re nothing but voices,
and most of the time not even that.
Sequence
My son out in the dark
picking the last
tomatoes and peppers
he’s weeded and mulched
and watered all summer
the night of the first frost
here,
the TV announcer almost
shouted,
so he went out with
the flashlight
I watched him tuck
in his jacket pocket
to pick his crop,
and I wanted to ask if
I could help,
I wanted to say I could
hold the light,
I wanted to say I should
never have let him ride
his bike
what, seventeen years ago?
on Wassergass Road
where the heavy Buick
sent him flying over
a hundred feet,
his atrophied leg, his right
eye lower than the left,
his inability to sequence
more than three steps
at a time,
steps to write an essay,
steps for three time blocks
before and after lunch,
steps to solve for X,
but I kept quiet, sat flicking
the remote control
while the door clicked
and I saw his light zigzag
up the black
till he got to what we both
knew
was the gate, the thought
then
of lifting the latch while
holding the flashlight
under his chin or in his mouth,
and third, the easy swinging out.
