may depress,
but I see it as the tree of winter
shedding its last leaves.

If it’s cold,
it’s only because winter
has paused over us,
resting without a coat.

If it’s grey,
it’s only because winter
hasn’t slept in days—
his face gone ashen.

Intellectually,
I’m indifferent to vicissitudes,
but my body feels the changes—
my body is the weak point.

I compensate—
growing leaves and poems
on my limbs,
that the spirit might carry
into Spring
what the body can’t.

I went to the other side
And saw one I loved
She lowered her head when I called
I saw my mother and father
Standing in the mist
Their faces pale and soft
Tell me it is you mother
Tell me it is you father
And amid the multitudes
I saw my brother
In all his sadness
Searching for his son
And I heard my father
Ask a question in my mind
What have you become
What have you become
And then I woke
To face what remains of me now

Did anyone else see it today?
Gallons of goldfinches
Poured out of the clouds,
Like gold coins were falling,
Like the wings of the sun
Were coming undone.
Some flocked, and others scattered,
Singing and flying
Like improvised jazz,
Like the music of joy,
Like playthings of peace—
Heard and seen,
But just out of reach.

Tell me where Jimmy Hoffa is.
Long as I can remember,
he’s been buried in my psyche.
Long as I can recall,
he’s been hidden in my memory.
America, I don’t recognize you.
All your money belongs to the rich,
and decent folk are a thing of the past.
Is Jimmy Hoffa in the air or the earth?
Was he incinerated,
scattered everywhere and nowhere
both at once and neither?
Is he buried under a building or freeway?
Perhaps at the bottom of a lake?
Crushed in some wrecking yard?
All the stories are true.
All the stories are false.
All the people talking are liars.
All the liars are telling the truth.

It’s too bad Ruth closed her fruit stand.
She’d sell fresh produce from the county
On a little piece of land she owned.
Ruth had an earth grain to her skin
Like bushels of greens, baskets of pears.
She loved to smile and talk,
Her heart as pure as sunlight on soil.
She had the wisdom of nature
And grit of work to her banter.
Now, when I drive past the stand,
It just looks abandoned, like Ruth
Had wandered into the wilderness,
And the blades of a standing fan
She left behind, turn without power,
Turn with the seasons, and haven’t stopped.

I’ll share this photograph of my parents with you.
It’s like an old wine overflowing time, still new.
They’re eighteen and twenty-four, in their best poor clothes,
Posing under an olive branch on a Roman road.
The picture is classically imbued; they, permeated
By natural light like actors in a neorealist film
Embraced in some final frame of desperate justice.
The photograph arrests the wind of the day, that moment,
Blowing blades of blurring grasses into living inertia,
Light pregnant even in the stones and shadows;
And there’s something more, something magical,
Beyond youth and beauty, a divinity being born,
Cupid bending the olive branch, the arrow flown.