THE CONVENT

i. Inside

To live in a small space,
a few shelves, a modest closet.
To count my possessions
on fingers and toes.
To breathe simplicity.
I say the Our Father
in Italian, its music
belongs in the room, mingling
with all the other Padre Nostros
said here across the
dusty years.

ii. Outside

Curves of belly, thigh,
forms in bodiless color
and the clean scent as they brush
damply against their owner’s cheek.
Richard Wilbur, did you actually
do laundry, to make the lovely
parallel, or just see it,
meditate on it while waking up?

now, here, the Italian woman
shakes the sheet before hanging it
over her high railing,
and a few drops reach me
in the street below. She calls down
an apology, but I feel blessed. How beautiful,
the white flapping sheet
that might take off any minute
and fly over Castiglion Fiorentino
leaving me looking up, mouth
agape,
a word which lightly mispronounced
means love.

WHITE PAGE AND A BLANK MIND

snow settles on my roofs and porches.
flakes drift across memory’s dollhouse,
the missing wall where my fingers hopped
up the stairs with Baby May or Grandma Jo

snowflakes over beginnings, middles and endings
the people you said goodbye to at the curb
the car that pulled away down the lane
to the road to the highway to beyond

flakes over the tiny stories you told
and those you lived, bigger flakes
swirling snowdrifts, swish of tires
in slush, tree fallen across the highway

that Conrad Aiken story about the mailman
walking through snow (that no one reads anymore)
he is coming down your street, the flakes
agglomerate, there is nothing now to see

white page and a blank mind

SLEEP IS A DRUG

In church it pulls at your sleeve
your head leans      someone is shouting far
in the distance      at dinner it pulls down your jaw
you cover with a napkin      sometimes in the car
lulled by the tires on the highway      just for a minute
your head drifts      thank God for the rough line
on the road’s rim      that brings you back in time
there is never enough      the suppliers give
only your prescribed hours      you try black-market
sleep, it leaves you logy      and uneasy
you try to stay awake      for the long day
you want an intervention      an irruption of life
somebody with a fiddle      to dance you away

RETIRED TEACHER

I was teaching again in last night’s dream,
all the students I ever had, thousands and thousands
from more than fifty years. I was lecturing
on the prosody of all things and the meaning
of language. Faces in the front kept changing—
my successful novelists, my suicide, the boy I failed twice
but gave him an A 3rd time through, a genius
who would did not do the work. The vaguely remembered
faces of B students, and on the board behind me

chaotic diagrams, Venn and algebra. I turn to them
with joy, though, and I say, “Look at these charts.
This is the way the language falls apart.
See, the consonants are slipping to the bottom,
you must say each separately, before it drifts
away entirely.” The G’s fell first, all the students
chanted them hard and soft, and they took notes.
I’m wearing two G’s as bracelets, they nip my arms
but the pain is good. The students stand.

We celebrate the dissolution of language,
shouting letters.