Book of My Nights Read online

a finished cloth

  frayed by the years, then gathered

  in the songs and games

  mothers teach their children.

  Look again

  and find yourself changed

  and changing, now the bewildered honey

  fallen into your own hands,

  now the immaculate fruit born of hunger.

  Now the unequaled perfume of your dying.

  And time? Time is the salty wake

  of your stunned entrance upon

  no name.

  Heir to All

  What I spill in a dream

  runs under my door,

  ahead of my arrival

  and the year’s wide round,

  to meet me in the color of hills

  at dawn, or else collected

  in a flower’s name

  I trace with my finger

  in a book. Proving

  only this: Listening is the ground

  below my sleep,

  where decision is born, and

  whoever’s heard the title

  autumn knows him by

  is heir to all those

  unfurnished rooms inside the roses.

  Discrepancies, Happy and Sad

  We’ve moved into a bigger house.

  Now our voices wander among the rooms

  calling, Where are you?

  And what we can’t forget

  of other houses confuses us

  as we answer back and forth, Over here!

  It’s a little like returning to the village

  where you were born, the sad bewilderment

  of discrepancies between

  what you remember and what’s there.

  No. It’s more like a memory of heaven.

  Voices coming closer, voices moving away,

  and what we thought we knew

  about life on earth confounding us.

  And then that question

  from which all the other questions begin.

  My Father’s House

  Here, as in childhood, Brother, no one sees us.

  And someone has died, and someone is not yet born.

  Our father walks through his church at night

  and sets all the clocks for spring. His sleeplessness

  weighs heavy on my forehead, his death almost

  nothing. In the letter he never wrote to us

  he says, No one can tell how long it takes a seed

  to declare what death and lightning told it

  while it slept. But stand at a window long enough,

  late enough, and you may some night hear

  a secret you’ll tomorrow, parallel to the morning,

  tell on a wide, white bed, to a woman

  like a sown ledge of wheat. Or you may never

  tell it, who lean across the night and miles of the sea,

  to arrive at a seed, in whose lamplit house

  resides a thorn, or a wee man carving

  a name on a stone, the name of the one who has died,

  the name of the one not born unknown.

  Someone has died. Someone is not yet born.

  And during this black interval,

  I sweep all three floors of our father’s house,

  and I don’t count the broom strokes; I row

  up and down for nothing but love: his for me, my own

  for the threshold, and for the woman’s voice

  I hear while I sweep, as though she swept beside me,

  a woman whose face, if she owns a face at all,

  is its own changing. And if I know her name

  I know to say it so softly she need not

  stop her work to hear me. Though when she lies down

  at night, in the room of our arrival,

  she’ll know I called her.

  And when she answers it’s morning,

  which even now is overwhelming, the woman

  combing her hair opposite to my departure.

  And only now and then do I lean at a jamb

  to see if I can see what I thought I heard.

  I heard her ask, My love, why can’t you sleep?

  and answer, Someone has died, and someone

  is not yet born. Meanwhile, I hear the voices

  of women telling a story in the round,

  and I sit down on the rough stoop, by the sea grass,

  and go on folding the laundry I was folding,

  the everyday clothes of our everyday life, the death

  clothes wearing us clean to the bone.

  And I know the tide is rising early,

  and I can’t hope to trap the story

  told in the round. But the woman I know

  says, Sleep, so I lie down on the clothes,

  the folded and unfolded, the life and the death.

  Ages go by. When I wake, the story has changed

  the firmament into domain, domain

  into a house, and the sun speaks the day,

  unnaming, showing the telling, dissipating

  the boundaries of the story to include

  the one who has died and the one not yet born.

  How still the morning grows about the voice

  of one child reading to another.

  How much a house is house at all due

  to one room where an elder child reads

  to his brother. And the younger knows by heart

  the brother-voice. How dark the other rooms,

  how slow morning comes

  collected in a name

  told at one sill

  and listened for at the threshold of dew.

  What book is this we read

  together, Brother, and at which window

  of our father’s house? In which upper room?

  We read it twice: once in two voices, to each other,

  and once in unison, to children

  and the sun, our star, that vast office

  we sit inside while birds lend their church

  sown in air, realized in a body uttering

  windows, growing rafters, couching seeds.

  The Moon from Any Window

  The moon from any window is one part

  whoever’s looking.

  The part I can’t see

  is everything my sister keeps to herself.

  One part my dead brother’s sleepless brow,

  the other part the time I waste, the time

  I won’t have.

  But which is the lion

  killed for the sake of the honey inside him,

  and which the wine, stranded

  in a valley, unredeemed?

  And don’t forget the curtains. Don’t forget the wind

  in the trees, or my mother’s voice saying things

  that will take my whole life to come true.

  One part earnest child grown tall

  in his mother’s doorway, and one a last look

  over the shoulder before leaving.

  And never forget it answers to no address,

  but calls wave after wave

  to a path of thirst. Never forget

  the candle climbing down

  without glancing back.

  And what about the heart

  counting alone, out loud, in that game

  in which the many hide from the one?

  Never forget the cry

  completely hollowed of the dying one

  who cried it.

  Only in such pure outpouring

  is there room for all this night.

  Degrees of Blue

  At the place in the story

  where a knock at the hull wakes the dreamer

  and he opens his eyes to find the rowers gone,

  the boat tied to an empty dock,

  the boy looks up from his book,

  out the window, and sees

  the hills have turned their backs,

  they are walking into evening.

  How long does he watch them go?

  Does the part of him that
follows

  call for years across his growing sadness?

  When he returns to the tale,

  the page is dark,

  and the leaves at the window have been traveling

  beside his silent reading

  as long as he can remember.

  Where is his father?

  When will his mother be home?

  How is he going to explain

  the moon taken hostage, the sea

  risen to fill up all the mirrors?

  How is he going to explain the branches

  beginning to grow from his ribs and throat,

  the cries and trills starting in his own mouth?

  And now that ancient sorrow between his hips,

  his body’s ripe listening

  the planet

  knowing itself at last.

  The Sleepless

  Like any ready fruit, I woke

  falling toward beginning and

  welcome, all of night

  the only safe place.

  Spoken for, I knew

  a near hand would meet me

  everywhere I heard my name

  and the stillness ripening

  around it. I found my inborn minutes

  decreed, my death appointed

  and appointing. And singing

  collects the earth

  about my rest,

  making of my heart

  the way home.

  Our River Now

  Say night is a house you inherit,

  and in the room in which you hear the sea

  declare its countless and successive deaths,

  tolling the dimensions of your dying,

  you close your eyes and dream

  the king’s bees build the king’s honey

  in the furthest reaches of your childhood.

  Wouldn’t you set your clocks

  by that harvest?

  And didn’t you, a sleepless child

  saying to yourself the name

  your parents gave you over and over,

  hear both the ringing sum of you

  such sound accounted for

  and all the rest, the dumb

  throng of you, that never answered to a word,

  that stands even now assembled where

  your calling brinks, the unutterable

  luring your voice out of its place of rocks

  and into a multitude of waters?

  But what was it I meant to say?

  Something about our beginningless past.

  Maybe. Maybe our river, dreaming out loud,

  folds story and forgetting.

  The Bridge

  The stars report a vast consequence

  our human moment joins.

  Or is it all the dark

  around them speaking?

  And if someone who listened for years

  one night hears Home,

  what is he to do with the story

  his bones hum to him

  about the dust?

  Let him go in search of the hiding place

  of the dew, where the hours are born.

  Let him uncover whose heart

  beats behind the falling leaves.

  And as for the one who hears Remember,

  well, I began to sing

  the words my father sang

  when he knelt to teach me

  how to tie my shoes:

  Crossing over, crossing under, little bird,

  build your bridge by nightfall.

  Words for Worry

  Another word for father is worry.

  Worry boils the water

  for tea in the middle of the night.

  Worry trimmed the child’s nails before

  singing him to sleep.

  Another word for son is delight,

  another word, hidden.

  And another is One-Who-Goes-Away.

  Yet another, One-Who-Returns.

  So many words for son:

  He-Dreams-for-All-Our-Sakes.

  His-Play-Vouchsafes-Our-Winter-Share.

  His-Dispersal-Wins-the-Birds.

  But only one word for father.

  And sometimes a man is both.

  Which is to say sometimes a man

  manifests mysteries beyond

  his own understanding.

  For instance, being the one and the many,

  and the loneliness of either. Or

  the living light we see by, we never see. Or

  the sole word weighs

  heavy as a various name.

  And sleepless worry folds the laundry for tomorrow.

  Tired worry wakes the child for school.

  Orphan worry writes the note he hides

  in the child’s lunch bag.

  It begins, Dear Firefly.…

  Little Father

  I buried my father

  in the sky.

  Since then, the birds

  clean and comb him every morning

  and pull the blanket up to his chin

  every night.

  I buried my father underground.

  Since then, my ladders

  only climb down,

  and all the earth has become a house

  whose rooms are the hours, whose doors

  stand open at evening, receiving

  guest after guest.

  Sometimes I see past them

  to the tables spread for a wedding feast.

  I buried my father in my heart.

  Now he grows in me, my strange son,

  my little root who won’t drink milk,

  little pale foot sunk in unheard-of night,

  little clock spring newly wet

  in the fire, little grape, parent to the future

  wine, a son the fruit of his own son,

  little father I ransom with my life.

  Lullaby

  After crying, Child,

  there’s still singing to be done.

  Your voice, the size of the heart’s

  first abandonment,

  is for naming

  the span each falling thing endures,

  and then for sounding

  a country under speech, dark hillsides

  of an older patience outwaiting

  what you or your mother and father

  could ever say.

  What does day proclaim there

  where birds glean all of our

  remaindered sleep? After wings

  and the shadows of wings, there’s still

  the whole ungrasped body

  of flying to uncover.

  After standing, outnumbered, under petals

  and their traceless falling

  out of yesterday

  into open want,

  we’re still the fruit to meet,

  still the ancient shapes

  of jars and bowls to weigh,

  and still the empty hands

  in which the hours never pool.

  One Heart

  Look at the birds. Even flying

  is born

  out of nothing. The first sky

  is inside you, open

  at either end of day.

  The work of wings

  was always freedom, fastening

  one heart to every falling thing.

  Praise Them

  The birds don’t alter space.

  They reveal it. The sky

  never fills with any

  leftover flying. They leave

  nothing to trace. It is our own

  astonishment collects

  in chill air. Be glad.

  They equal their due

  moment never begging,

  and enter ours

  without parting day. See

  how three birds in a winter tree

  make the tree barer.

  Two fly away, and new rooms

  open in December.

  Give up what you guessed

  about a whirring heart, the little

  beaks and
claws, their constant hunger.

  We’re the nervous ones.

  If even one of our violent number

  could be gentle

  long enough that one of them