Rainy Afternoons of the Soul

No dark nights: the only sign, that there are no
signs. No signs at all. Oh, earth, this could be

a deal breaker. Desire stitches night to day.
I ask the pencil to make an apple: brown

leaf, ridged folds of rust & yellow. The pencil
declines. The unsketched apple's perishable,

reticent, objectively there, though a pen,
an umbrella, & a key have gone missing.

Do lost opportunities count? In the bird
feeder, a song-and-dance sparrow pecks away.

In our house, weekly, you feed the birds while I
marry the socks into matching pairs. I speak

in indexicals—no nominalist, I—
so everything's pared down: in the shower,

the cuttle-bone-like core of a bar of soap,
just for example. Although I consider

how Montaigne says it is pitiful to be
languid & feeble even in one's desires.

And we don't want pity, but birds . . . taking flight
presumably. Like the old man on the bus

whose finger traces signs on his jeans—no ink—
writing lists of items he can't forget, or

maybe the letters of a new alphabet
with which he could break into another world.

Not the one where the birds at the feeder are
food for thought, domestic hieroglyphs. Or where light

glints on the red pick-up truck across the street
& almost makes up for all this emptiness. For

the loneliness, I'd say, but that requires
desire. Like Pascal's. He carried near his heart

a scrap of parchment that said "joy." I don't know
why I'm haunted by 17th-century

Frenchmen when outside my study a humming
bird tries to drink from a red plastic mesh bag,

the kind that holds or used to hold fruit, the bird's
small beak thrusting into what contains only

air & is itself more emptiness than weave,
like a series of commas trying to splice fragments

of thought together. Go figure. All
night I think about fishing as a better

sign of truth. About how fish are in motion,
threatened, & need to be released, though I wake

asking "Why bother the fish at all?" Today,
being Sunday & a holiday, you note

that we will not get mail twice. I can see some
turning point arriving from quite far away.

God save us, I'd say, were I inclined to invoke
higher powers—not this trying, nothing doing.




From Absence & Presence (University of Tampa Press, 2013). Reprinted with the permission of the author.