i am going to start living like a mystic
Today I am pulling on a green wool sweater
and walking across the park in a dusky snowfall.
​
The trees stand like twenty-seven prophets in a field,
each a station in a pilgrimage—silent, pondering.
​
Blue flakes of light falling across their bodies
are the ciphers of a secret, an occultation.
​
I will examine their leaves as pages in a text
and consider the bookish pigeons, students of winter.
​
I will kneel on the track of a vanquished squirrel
and stare into a blank pond for the figure of Sophia.
​
I shall begin scouring the sky for signs
as if my whole future were constellated upon it.
​
I will walk home alone with the deep alone,
a disciple of shadows, in praise of the mysteries.
lay back the darkness
My father in the night shuffling from room to room
on an obscure mission through the hallway.
​
Help me, spirits, to penetrate his dream
and ease his restless passage.
​
Lay back the darkness for a salesman
who could charm everything but the shadows,
​
an immigrant who stands on the threshold
of a vast night
​
without his walker or his cane
and cannot remember what he meant to say,
​
though his right arm is raised, as if in prophecy,
while his left shakes uselessly in warning.
​
My father in the night shuffling from room to room
is no longer a father or a husband or a son,
​
but a boy standing on the edge of a forest
listening to the distant cry of wolves,
​
to wild dogs,
to primitive wingbeats shuddering in the treetops.