But is it really you
behind the pretenses
beyond dust and distances
beneath the salt and the siren
announcements and ancient
impurities and decays
that claim to be you

we have thought we knew you
emerging around us
as we came to the lake
and racing by us
as we listened to the river
and reminding us
from the ends of the streets
and waving across the boardwalk
and along the sand
and hovering above the clear glass

as a child I ran to you
with a pounding heart
and out in the desert
the camel turns to you
and the rain at night
falls through you

yet it is said that none
of the breaths that we
believe to be you
is really your own
for you have none
that is yours alone

and what we take to be
you is only
what is told about you
while you remain
apart from it like our days
our nights our years

To a Few Cherries

Peter and I are up where the branches
sink and swing out underfoot as though they
were not anchored and with the lightest breeze
the limb one hand is holding pulls away
like someone being called but we go on
reaching higher into the leaves where they
shimmer against the light toward a dark one
set among them for the sweetest they say
are those highest up and now the season
is over the last are the best and we
are eating more as we climb drunk on you
laughing but old Delsol warns us from down
below Don’t trust that tree until we leave you
untasted for all the rest of the story

To the Present Tense

By the time you are
by the time you come to be
by the time you read this
by the time you are written
by the time you forget
by the time you are water through fingers
by the time you are taken for granted
by the time it hurts
by the time it goes on hurting
by the time there are no words for you
by the time you remember
but without the names
by the time you are in the papers
and on the telephone
passing unnoticed there too

who is it
to whom you come
before whose very eyes
you are disappearing
without making yourself known

To My Grandfathers

You who never laid eyes on each other
only one of whom I met only once
and he was the one whose wife could never
forgive him neither would most of their sons
and daughters for the red list of his sins
mainly drink and slipping off downriver
to leave them and live to be a nuisance
out in a shed that time I was brought over
to meet him before they took him away
and you who died when my mother was four
with your fond hopes your wing collar and your
Bessie there was nothing you had to say
to each other to form an influence
soundless as that of planets in their distance

To This May

They know so much more now about
the heart we are told but the world
still seems to come one at a time
one day one year one season and here
it is spring once more with its birds
nesting in the holes in the walls
its morning finding the first time
its light pretending not to move
always beginning as it goes